If you don’t have a Fedora CD, then you need not despair. You can also repair the boot loader using one of the numerous live CDs available.
via How to Repair a Corrupt MBR and boot into Linux | All about Linux.
The chroot command is featured in this howto article.
Moving into specific changes made to DirectX 11.1, Microsoft has made it much better at redrawing portions of the screen, such as on YouTube, where only the video segment should be constantly re-rendered. By reducing redundant redrawing of text and other static elements, there is less memory and processor cycle wastage.
via Windows 8 graphics: Microsoft has hardware accelerated all the things | ExtremeTech.
In all cases, faster and more efficient rendering will result in less hardware resources being used, and thus lower power consumption. In the entire cycle of Windows 8, improved efficiency and battery life are probably the strongest and most recurring themes. If the unremovable Metro Start Screen and Surface tablets wasn’t proof enough, this laser-tight focus on efficiency makes it patently clear that Microsoft’s primary concern is being competitive against Google and Apple in the mobile computing sector.
Sony Chemical & Information Device Corp. has demonstrated a thermal sheet that it claims matches thermal paste in terms of cooling ability while beating it on life span. The key to the sheet is a combination of silicon and carbon fibers, to produce a thermal conductive layer that’s between 0.3 and 2mm thick.
Use Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) to transfer files asynchronously between a client and a server. There are three types of transfer jobs. A download job downloads files to the client, an upload job uploads a file to the server, and an upload-reply job uploads a file to the server and receives a reply file from the server application.
via About BITS.
Caught a Microsoft BITS agent uploading some stuff to my laptop from google.com. It seems Chrome related yet I don’t have Chrome installed. Might need to track this down.
Security researchers from AVG were decompiling a trojan — it had been originally posted to a Diablo III forum, masquerading as a how-to video — when the malware’s author popped up in a window on their screen. It turned out that the trojan had a built-in chat, as well as a screen-capture facility. The hacker who wrote the malware saw them working on defeating her or his virus and decided to tell them off for their audacity. Franklin Zhao and Jason Zhou, the AVG researchers, wrote up their experience:
via Malware author taunts security researchers with built-in chat – Boing Boing.
With the GPLv3-licensed GRUB2 not being an option, Canonical then explored using the GRUB Legacy release with EFI patches on top, but they didn’t want to touch that aging code-base. Canonical has decided to use Intel’s efilinux loader that is more liberally licensed and they’re able to make some modifications to provide a simple menu interface.
via [Phoronix] Ubuntu’s Plans To Implement UEFI SecureBoot: No GRUB2.
PCs are always getting simpler and more streamlined, but there are still a lot of different parts to most of them, which means that there is a lot more that can go wrong with them. We’ll go through potential problems component by component, matching symptoms to issues and telling you the best way to inform your friend on the other end of the phone. Pay attention here, because many of these symptoms and procedures are also going to be useful when troubleshooting Macs, phones, and tablets.
via The technologist’s guide to troubleshooting hardware | Ars Technica.
Laptops are expensive. It’s critical that consumers have the option to repair things that go wrong, as well as upgrade their own hardware to keep it relevant as new technologies roll out. On top of being glued together, the new MacBook Pro is virtually non-upgradeable—making it the first MacBook Pro that will be unable to adapt to future advances in memory and storage technology.
Web wanderers are more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by peering at porn, according to a study released on Tuesday.
via Religious sites ‘riskier than porn for viruses’.
“We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free; it’s not good for repeat business.”
The Nouveau driver has had a long and challenging journey to get where’s it at today where the developers are now comfortable with the Nouveau driver leaving the Linux kernel’s staging area and thus also fully committing to a stable ABI for their kernel driver (their DRM version is also now marked as v1.0). Nouveau began more than a half-decade ago; I first wrote about the project in 2006 and it wasn’t until 2007 that OpenGL began to sort of work on this free software driver that was started by Stephane Marchesin (he’s no longer directly involved with Nouveau as for a while now he’s been off working for Google on Chrome OS). Nouveau’s journey has been quite interesting and in the past six years has earned itself 450 news posts where I have written about this open-source NVIDIA driver and over 60 featured articles that have included benchmarks or more extensive information on this Linux driver.
via [Phoronix] Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Approaches Stable State.