Category: Computers, Science & Technology

I bought a Slingbox way back in the day. Alas, it is no more. (Of course, I threw mine away many years ago, so oh well!)

SlashDot – “Dish Network announced that it will permanently shut down all of Sling Media’s Slingbox services and end support for the devices in two years, at which point they’ll no longer work. Variety reports:
On Monday, Dish’s Sling Media unit announced that Slingbox servers will be permanently taken offline 24 months from Nov. 9, 2020. ‘Until then, most Slingbox models will continue to work normally, but the number of supported devices for viewing will steadily decrease as versions of the SlingPlayer apps become outdated and/or lose compatibility,’ the company said in a message posted Monday.

In an FAQ about the shutdown, Dish said Slingbox is being discontinued because ‘We’ve had to make room for new innovative products so that we can continue to serve our customers in the best way possible.’ Sling will not be releasing any new products; most authorized resellers have been out of stock of the Slingbox devices ‘for a couple years,’ according to the company. Sling Media was acquired by EchoStar in 2007 for $380 million, which at the time was Dish’s parent company. Years before Netflix became a streaming powerhouse, the Slingbox ‘place-shifting’ devices let customers watch pay-TV channels over the internet. But the products never became a mainstream category in the way streaming-media players like Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV have.”

I love Acronis Backup, and I have used it for years, but this is an Open Source alternative. Check out this information from their web site!

https://clonezilla.org/

“Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program similar to True Image® or Norton Ghost®. It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery. Three types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live, Clonezilla lite server, and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla lite server or SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the hard disk. This increases the clone efficiency. With some high-end hardware in a 42-node cluster, a multicast restoring at rate 8 GB/min was reported.

Click the “Get VPN” banner BELOW for a great deal!

The new Google Chromecast for 2020 has some great new features:

• It Debuts Google TV
• Supports Android TV apps
• 4K HDR 60fps, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos
• Google Assistant built-in

I am hoping that when you plug it in to your TV’s USB port for power, it doesn’t go into unreachable mode like the old one! Here’s hoping! The remote has an on/off button, but that seems to turn your SmartTV on and off via HDMI (if your TV supports that.) I am hoping there will be a way to “wake it up” better than my current version.

There is no support for Google’s On-Line Gaming through the web app, called “Stadia,” but support is supposed to be be added in the future, say about the 2021 timeframe.

It sells from about $49.99 at Best Buy, Walmart, etc. and be available in three colors: “snow,” “sunrise,” and “sky.” Google says that it is manufactured from 49% recycled plastics, for all you tree huggers out there!

Python is getting ubiquitous in the programming and computing world, and has been around for some time. If you want a simple beginners tutorial, look no further!

I have long used (and, actually, still use) FTP as a means to update websites as a webmaster, but the day of FTP may soon be behind us!

Tedium – By: Ernie Smith – “Here’s a small piece of news you may have missed while you were trying to rebuild your entire life to fit inside your tiny apartment at the beginning of the COVID crisis: Because of the way that the virus shook up just about everything, Google skipped the release of Chrome version 82. Who cares, you think? Well, users of FTP, or the File Transfer Protocol. During the pandemic, Google delayed its plan to kill FTP, and now that things have settled to some degree, Google recently announced that it is going back for the kill with Chrome version 86, which deprecates the support once again, and will kill it for good in Chrome 88. (Mozilla announced similar plans for Firefox, citing security reasons and the age of the underlying code.) It is one of the oldest protocols the mainstream internet supports—it turns 50 next year—but those mainstream applications are about to leave it behind. Today’s Tedium talks about history of FTP, the networking protocol that has held on longer than pretty much any other.

1971

The year that Abhay Bhushan, a masters student at MIT who was born in India, first developed the File Transfer Protocol. Coming two years after telnet, FTP was one of the first examples of a working application suite built for what was then known as ARPANET, predating email, Usenet, and even the TCP/IP stack. Like telnet, FTP still has a few uses, but has lost prominence on the modern internet largely because of security concerns, with encrypted alternatives taking its place—in the case of FTP, SFTP, a file transfer protocol that operates over the Secure Shell protocol (SSH), the protocol that has largely replaced telnet.

FTP is so old it predates email—and at the beginning, actually played the role of an email client
Of the many application-level programs built for the early ARPANET, it perhaps isn’t surprising that FTP is the one that stood above them all to find a path to the modern day.

The reason for that comes down to its basic functionality. It’s essentially a utility that facilitates data transfer between hosts, but the secret to its success is that it flattened the ground to a degree between these hosts. As Bhushan describes in his requests for comment paper, the biggest challenge of using telnet at the time was that every host was a little different.

‘Differences in terminal characteristics are handled by host system programs, in accordance with standard protocols,’ he explained, citing both telnet and the remote job entry protocol of the era. ‘You, however, have to know the different conventions of remote systems, in order to use them.'”

For the rest of this interesting article, check out Tedium at this link: FTP Fadeout

Some Linux versions are looking more and more like Windows these days. See my last Netcast for some examples, but THAT is nor what I mean when I say that Linux may yet win the desktop.

Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957,) often referred to as “ESR,” is an American software developer, Open Source software advocate, and author of the controversial 1997 essay and 1999 book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Interestingly, he is also a member of the Libertarian Party and is a gun rights advocate. In a September 25th Blog post he says:

“The two most intriguing developments in the recent evolution of the Microsoft Windows operating system are Windows System for Linux (WSL) and the porting of their Microsoft Edge browser to Ubuntu.

ESR at Linucon 2004

For those of you not keeping up, WSL allows unmodified Linux binaries to run under Windows 10. No emulation, no shim layer, they just load and go.

Microsoft developers are now landing features in the Linux kernel to improve WSL. And that points in a fascinating technical direction. To understand why, we need to notice how Microsoft’s revenue stream has changed since the launch of its cloud service in 2010.

Ten years later, Azure makes Microsoft most of its money. The Windows monopoly has become a sideshow, with sales of conventional desktop PCs (the only market it dominates) declining. Accordingly, the return on investment of spending on Windows development is falling. As PC volume sales continue to fall off , it’s inevitably going to stop being a profit center and turn into a drag on the business.

Looked at from the point of view of cold-blooded profit maximization, this means continuing Windows development is a thing Microsoft would prefer not to be doing. Instead, they’d do better putting more capital investment into Azure – which is widely rumored to be running more Linux instances than Windows these days.”

He speculates that one day, maybe even soon, Microsoft will give in to full Open Source support, then make our desktop Windows essentially a specialized distribution of Linux! It would have a “WINE-like” compatibility layer for older Windows programs, but would essentially be Linux under the hood!

A provocative idea, but with their biggest money maker, Azure, already running on Linux, way not? They need their Azure systems to stay up at 99.99999% and serve out systems securely, which is why Microsoft, old time Linux haters, now, for the most part, run Azure on Linux in their data centers! It is simply in their best interest! Will they now port everything in that direction? Maybe so, we’ll see!

If so, we will have finally won the Linux vs. Windows battle, without a shot being fired!

Our Roku has been “down” for some time, but good news! It is back! So, if you have a Roku device, you can now go there and subscribe for free to watch our programs on your TV!

Just use this link to subscribe with your Roku account: The Dr. Bill Bailey.NET NETcast Roku Channel!

Join us there for lot’s of geekery!

(Be sure to rate us with FIVE STARS!!!)

Back in April (the 23rd, in fact) Ubuntu released version 20.04 LTS. And, I have finished updating all my Ubuntu Linux servers (I have three) to the latest version. So, I have five years of “Long Term Support” (that’s what LTS stands for) ahead of me. I upgraded one from version 18, and two from version 19 to the latest version. It was pretty simple and easy. No hiccups! So, what’s new, you ask? Well some of this does not apply to me, because I am running the non-GUI server version, but here are just some of the highlights:

• Faster boot times
• Some GUI improvements
• Easier method to go to a “dark mode” on the GUI (one button flip)
• Fully Snap’ped Software Center (Bad if you read the earlier articles, I know), but there are 6,000 applications in the Snapcraft Linux App Store
• Uses the Linux 5.4 kernel version
• Includes Secure Boot to protect against low level attacks and rootkits
• WireGuard® is a new, simplified VPN with modern cryptography defaults
• Disappointing point, you still can’t drop files from the file manager to the desktop, oh well.