Posts by botfap

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Im surprised he wasn't forcibly parachuted into the Devuan camp

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Copying an existing utility purely for the purposes of re-writing in today's fashionable dialect is hardly innovation. Its ego driven indulgence. Sadly we seem to be seeing that more and more within the open source ecosystem

Imgur yanks Brit access to memes as parent company faces fine

Re: The ICO 'court'

Thats just dumb. Credit card companies are not going to sacrifice a global market for a tiny UK market. Especially one that can be bypassed by anyone with a VPN. Get your head out of your arse

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

Re: "gives people the freedom¹ to live² happier³, more fulfilling lives²."

You get different tax codes for your primary and secondary jobs. The primary job is the one where your tax free allowance is used and usually the job that employed you first. The tax code for the secondary job is obvious its for a secondary job so if you have someone with that tax code as an employer its clear they are working elsewhere. It was actually his LinkedIn that directed their HR to us, he was still listed as working for us

Re: "gives people the freedom¹ to live² happier³, more fulfilling lives²."

We replaced the key developer with an internal promotion and the infrastructure engineer with a promotion from the support team. We only employed 2 new peeps, 1 developer and 1 support engineer

Productivity is significantly higher back in office than WFH, especially in the dev team. We also get better collaboration less head butting. Only a very small percentage of people are more effective working in isolation or a WFH environment. Most people take advantage of it and do less or just cant structure themselves effectively. This was the last of our 3 offices that had been RTO's, the first came back over 2 years ago. The patterns were pretty similar for all 3. The only team that didn't see a decent productivity change between WFH and RTO was sales

Yes, yes, I know. Everyone here is a superstar and in that few percent that works more effectively in isolation / WFH and coming back to the office is a terrible idea. The problem is the real world doesn't match that utopia for the majority of people. If it did the vast majority of businesses would not have RTO'd. No business want to reduce productivity

Re: "gives people the freedom¹ to live² happier³, more fulfilling lives²."

Also gets them sacked

I had 4 developers, 2 support engineers and an infrastructure engineer that refused to RTO last year. Fortunately for us only 1 of the developers was a good performer and the other 6 were no great loss. I gave them 90 days to reorganise and get back to the office but it didnt happen so out they went. I later found out that the good developer who didnt return had been working for another company for 8 months while taking a salary from us. That did explain his unavailability during work hours. He got found out by his new employer from his non standard tax code and they contacted us to confirm his employment dates. He got sacked from his new employer too for double dipping. Shame, he was quite good technically and good with people and would have made director and a shareholder within a couple of years if he hadnt got so greedy

Linux Mint 22.2 polishes the desktop, but kernel updates are the real deal

Re: Nothing on libadapta?

libAdapta looks promising and I hope they make use of it. It has the potential to make Cinnamon and XFCE desktop much more consistent

Sadly it doesnt seem to be used by the Mint team as yet. Ive just done the 22.0 to 22.2 upgrade and a lot of the new default apps are still using libAdwaita not libAdapta. System monitor is particularly garish in bright white appearance on my dark themed desktop

The new fingerprint authentication app is very nice though. Its the first time Ive been able to use my laptops fingerprint reader without a lot of fannying about to set it up with 3rd party software

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

The Eric S. Raymond edition?

WD escapes half a billion in patent damages as judge trims award to $1

Re: $500 million to 1 ?

Patent violation is patent violation. The judged confirmed that was the case

Actual damages should not matter in this case. The damages awarded are supposed to be Compensatory Damages for patent infringement, actual damages are irrelevant or at best optional

There is something very wrong with the outcome of this case. It doesnt follow normal legal guidelines or precedents and I suspect that it wont be the final result as it gets escalated

Linux Foundation tries to play peacemaker in ongoing WordPress scuffle

Re: There is a YouTube video of the announcement

Please dont post links with tracking codes. https://www.youtube.com/live/IOsOAsbD1gA is more than adequate

Thanks for the link

EU tells US scientists to dump Trump for a lab in Europe

Re: Europeanuts (InB4 political bashing begins - oops, too late)

But but but muh Elong Muskrat. You have to be voted down because it doesnt matter if you are right, politics comes first. Everything is political Dontchaknow?

Grok does have worse general knowledge than ChatGPT-4o right now but it hallucinates a lot less which overall makes it a better, more consistent tool for our use. Though we continue to use both

Dems look to close the barn door after top DOGE dog has bolted

Re: Consequences of gerontocracy

> its not hypocrisy because its my team!

lol, that was reddit worthy. Have some gold kind stranger

Re: Consequences of gerontocracy

She is fighting the oligarchy while flying round on private jets paid for by the very people she is supposed to be fighting

And the most hilarious part of this is not the hypocrisy, though its worth a giggle. Nope its that most of the posters here cant even see the hypocrisy and yet somehow think they are enlightened. You couldnt make it up! Amazing :D

Re: Consequences of gerontocracy

If AOC is considered competent then the Dems are in bigger trouble than I realised. Who next? David Hogg for president?

Constantly warping on social media is inversely correlated to competence

SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule docks to the International Space Station

Musk Bad

SpaceX Bad

Twatter Bad

Tesla Bad

How very dare you report on BAD™ person company unless its in a negative manner

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

Re: Hmmm

If you already have Windows SQL Server licenses for 2017, 2019 or 2022 then those licenses can be used against Linux SQL Server installs. You dont need to buy new ones

We run our HR stuff on SQL Server on Linux as its a far cheaper option than the other supported alternative, Oracle

I dont see how a company wanting to charge license fees for its own products is "making it hard for people to use Cloud other than Azure using licence money as the weapon"

Exchange Server 2019 has less than six months of support left in the tank

I use iRedMail with SoGo webmail for my personal setup and its great but its hardly a feature replacement for Exchange, not even close

Its also much messier to admin than Exchange, despite its more limited functionality

Basic things like sender dependant SMTP maps are just not supported by iRedMail. I mean you can make them work but your install is no longer supported. There is no EWS support so enterprise mail is no go. There is ActiveSync support via Z-Push but ActiveSync is no longer supported by Windows or macOS desktops and has never been supported on Linux desktops

VMware distributor Arrow says minimum software subs set to jump from 16 to 72 cores

My cats breath smells of cat food

Re: why?

No updates and no way to add capacity

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Downvoted solely for use of the word "woke"

No big changes to UK broadband regs, despite no real competition for BT

I recently moved off the OpenReach network over to YouFibre for both home and office

and the difference is enormous.

Latency between home and office dropped from 40ms to 3ms on average. The connections are symmetric so I get a full Gigabit VPN connection between home and office and its dirt cheap. £35 for 1GB both ways and £104 for 8GB both ways at the office with static IPv4 allocations. They even let us set PTR records for the static IP's so we moved our mail and web back on prem

Keeping the BT connections as a standby for now but so far the service has been great and the support OK. There have been a couple of "scheduled upgrade" outages but we always get advance notice and they do it between 3am-4am

Makes me wonder why BT cant match a little outfit like YouFibre

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

Re: Shitstorm

Because Wordpress is GPLv2 licensed and the code, which is what WP Engine and its customers are accessing, must be distributed to anyone who already has Wordpress. You cant retroactively change the license

CHIPS Act funding in question as House Speaker waffles on plan to repeal bill

I like the idea of the CHIPS Act

I like the idea of the CHIPS Act but its implementation has been a disaster so far. The only real win for the US has been Micron's new DRAM fabs. DRAM isnt what was critically short at the time, it was logic fab capacity so Im not sure how big a win that is. Most of the rest has gone to non US Companies

$280 billion should have the US up with its own, US owned, leading edge logic fabs and yet not one single dollar has been spent on that

They should have setup a US competitor to TSMC instead of paying TSMC to build fabs in the US, which has so far been a spectacular failure. That US fab could have had Apple, AMD, NVidia, TI, etc as immediate customers and those clients should have been involved in the development process and planning

You're right not to rush into running AMD, Intel's new manycore monster CPUs

Re: Missing the point

Absolute bollox, you clearly dont work in this arena. Super high core systems have generally very low clocks which makes them poor systems for running single application images. There are pretty much zero applications that scale up upto a 192 core EPYC Turin in a single application image. Those that do generally get better performance from running multiple images across lower core count, higher clock speed servers anyway

High core counts are for managing multiple, lower single thread performance, application images on the same physical hardware, they generally dont scale up a single image. You have got this completely back to front

China trains 100-billion-parameter AI model on home grown infrastructure

Re: tofu telecom

The Chinese have been focused on asynchronous training for AI from the start. The west has so far been running a purely synchronous model. The wests approach works better at small scale but fails to scale outside of a single data centre cluster

Western companies are starting to wake up to that mistake however and Google is currently leading the curve when it comes to asynchronous training. OpenAI has plans to explore asynchronus training too but they are all behind the Chinese in terms of asynchronous experience at the minute

Interesting article on asynchronous training ambitions of the western AI companies:

Multi-Datacenter Training: OpenAI's Ambitious Plan To Beat Google's Infrastructure

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/multi-datacenter-training-openais

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Im also a contrarian so I shit in my sink and wash dishes in the lav

Apple is coming to take 30% cut of new Patreon subs on iOS

Re: That is an absolute dick move

lol its seems that the reg readers have become so detached and clueless that they dont appreciate a perfectly balanced response. Shameful, makes me wonder if Elon is the good guy afterall

Another GPU cloud emerges. This time, upstart Foundry

Nice PR but whats described amounts to a 2-3% efficiency boost at best. Not enough to make any kind of fundamental difference to the almost exclusively loss making "AI" projects that have zero path to profitability. The only people making money in this game are NVidia and the electric companies

Desktop hypervisors are not dead: Oracle preps major VirtualBox update

lol

However much I love to blame shit on Oracle, thats hardly the fault of virtualbox

Arm servers are on Nutanix's long-range radar, not yet its to-do list

Not really. While ARM has started to make a small imprint into customer workloads on Amazon and Oracle clouds its still very much of a niche market. In terms of corporate maket share (Nutanix target customers) ARM is still zero or a rounding error at best. There are no tier 1 vendors selling ARM Equipment into the channel yet

I would love to see readily available ARM kit but right now it doesnt exist in volume. We actually run some ARM kit in production but its very low volume kit from specialist OEM and the support is poor

Lords of May-hem: Seven signs it is Oracle's year end

Re: Who would voluntarily deal with this company

Its never cheaper to move them into Azure cloud. Either you are a lazy boy or you haven't done your sums properly. In no way, shape or form is it cheaper to run Oracle services on Azure than it is on prem, even for a tiny number of servers (8 as you say). Even if you needed a single dedicated staff member for them, its still not cheaper

Azure is roughly 3X the cost of Oracles own cloud services, even Oracles services that run inside Azure. Ive done the maths on this for tens of clients. Never in a single instance did it make financial sense to move on prem Oracle services to Azure

Linux 6.9 arrives, plus Torvalds indicates Arm64 will get a bit more love

Re: Ampere machine

Yeah they are pretty good value. It doesnt show it on that page but there are 128 core variants available now. We bought 5 more in February and the 128 core / 192GB RAM variant was a little over £3600 (ex-vat) per unit with the 4x10GB network upgrades. About the same as high end gaming rig or top specced Apple laptop with 12 cores. Of course grpahics is handled by the BMC and they are terrible but fine for development work as long as you are not doing 3D stuff but you can add pretty much any consumer or professional AMD or NVidia card if you need that

You can but single unit quantities of the 32-128 core variants from i-Pi for not much more:

https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platform?variant=42970872053922

Re: Ampere machine

He was previously using Apple devices for the ARM side but Im fairly certain that he would have been offered an Ampere Developer Platform Desktop. Even we got one of them and we are just a smallish sized dev house doing mainly embedded and optimised cloud images

These are the systems they were giving out, which anyone can also buy:

https://amperecomputing.com/systems/altra/kraken-comhpc-WS

Geoff Greeling did a review if you have interest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl5H5rT87JE

Re: bring back microkernels

If only Linux would have re-implemented Plan9 instead of Unix

Re: cheeky appeal for advice

Harsh but mainly fair. You are correct in that its not just ASUS. Ive seen the same lazy stupidity with HP, Lenovo and pretty much every OEM. Even with Laptops that are sold as "Linux" laptops, especially from Dell

The linux side DSDT situation is actually quite good now. You can still dump, modify and recompile the DSDT. The live DSDT lives at /proc/acpi/dsdt or /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/DSDT. You can decompile, edit and recompile with iasl which is a standard tool in all distros Ive seen

None of that however helps a non technical user. Its a pretty simple process to dump, edit and re-create a DSDT if someone else has figured out the missing bit. However figuring out how to fix the DSDT itself can be a pretty daunting process, even for seasoned developers, if you dont have good references and documentation which the OEM's just dont provide

Re: cheeky appeal for advice

I have the same with the 13900H CPU variant that I use as my travelling device. If its the latest model (UX6404) then you can fix it by adding a quirk definition into Linux Mints 6.5 kernel config and rebuilding the CSC3551 module. Its simple enough but can feel a bit of a palava if you have never done it before

Full details here: https://github.com/rykdesjardins/fix-UX6404VI-audio-linux

The cause of the problem is not actually a kernel issue. Its a badly developed BIOS from ASUS which is missing parts of the ACPI/DSDT table. The kernel quirk just works around the ASUS error. Hopefully it will be fixed in a future ASUS BIOS update however this same problem is quite common on a lot of recent ASUS laptops

You want us to think of the children? Couldn't agree more

Re: Please, please stop it. Damnit.

You are clearly not woke enough to post here. Take you your factual observations elsewhere you nazi

SAP users aren't keen on upping spending right now

Re: Need a disruptor - disrupted

Give pottering a spec for an ERP system and you would get back a volume control widget with embedded USB missile launcher control

Could actually end up more useful than SAP

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

Re: A better long-term approach...

Which is exactly why RedHat should be moated, because thats exactly what they are doing and have been for some time

Zuckerberg wants to build artificial general intelligence with 350K Nvidia H100 GPUs

Re: AI

They just spent $36 billion on their metaverse with nothing to show for it. Its been well over a decade since facebook made a sensible investment decision

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

Notes / Domino user management was pretty straightforward and easily scriptable / automated with LotusScript. I did a pretty simple AD GPO that triggered a LotusScript that kept AD users & groups synced with Notes. It even deleted users and archived off their mailboxes / databases

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

Apples and oranges

Notepad++ is a text editor, WordPad is a document editor. Completely different tools for different purposes

Intel's PC chip ship is sinking with Arm-ada on the horizon

Re: A Series of Unfortunate Decisions

Centrino had nothing to do with Atoms. It was a branch back to the Pentium 3 arch and and acceptance that the P4 arch had no future because of its high power consumption and low IPC

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Lost the plot

You do seem to be having trouble with it. Point to the place on the doll where they hurt you?