Posts by jlturriff 14 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2022
I notice that your list of warnings does not include misuse by lobbyists of government entities and politicians, foreign governments, and organized crime, which (at least in the US) seem all-too-likely to occur, since the majority of politicians here are in the pockets of big business and other well-financed organizations whose only interest is to further expand their coffers and power.
"Seems distributions that once championed "User Choice" in Linux are now abandoning the community and choice in favor of the corporate customer."
Indeed.
And from desktop environments (Gnome, KDE) to init -> systemd, developers seem to have forgotten in many cases that there are people (both individual and corporate) who use Linux for real work, who need stability to get their jobs done, in favour of the newest "gee-whiz" conceptual "features," many of which have not been requested by the end-users of Linux. The corporate users have the time and resources to retrain their staff to adapt to these gratuitous changes, but not without considerable cost; and private users are left in the dark about what will happen to their systems as the changes are implemented. Gnome and KDE continue to make radical changes to their desktop environments; OpenSUSE surprised us with BtrFS, systemd, and stuff like PulseAudio and the like, and now we hear that Leap will be discontinued, that everything will move to package virtualization, but we don't need to know the details because 'everything will be lovely, lovely by and by...'
"...totally law abiding owner of their software;"
Never forget that you almost never OWN software of any type that you acquire from anyone (including, ironically, Gnu/Linux), you only hold a (revokable) license to use it. Yes, the vast majority of open source providers will never jerk the rug from under you, but there have been instances where open source software has been unexpectedly transferred to entities that were not so friendly. And remember, we're talking about other things than executables, e.g. ebooks: If an ebook provider (Microsoft comes to mind) decides to terminate their ebook library program, poof! the books for which you purchased licenses are just gone (unless you've hacked their library to obtain a private copy, thereby technically becoming a felon). You otherwise have no recourse, because the library no longer exists.
"It's all optional. Some distros avoid the whole thing. There is still choice."
For the moment. Given the responses by OpenSUSE to pushback from the desktop community, very soon it will NOT be optional; and probably not long after that, most of the other distros will fall in line the way they did with systemd.
'"We want teens to be safe online. We've developed more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including supervision tools that let parents limit the amount of time their teens spend on Instagram, and age verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences," Antigone Davis, global head of safety at Meta told.'
Pretty much says it all. This is very much worse than closing the barn door after the horses have left.
As a 30-year IBM mainframe veteran, I'm still experiencing withdrawal after my retirement, because I can't find a text-editor as user-friendly, flexible and extendable (with Rexx) as VM/CMS's Xedit. I have been wishing for years for an emulated z/VM system that I could use for my personal hobby work, but the closest available so far is pre-Xedit VM/370. :-(
When Google announced that Kansas City would be the pilot city for their first iteration, everyone was very enthusiastic. After a year, it became clear that the service would not be available in low-income areas of the city, nor in apartment or condominium buildings. As far as I know, there has been little if any improvement in coverage in greater KC, and until now, Google has been very quiet about the state of their experiment.
Sounds like intel (and presumably its competitors) are finally catching up to IBM's 360+ architecture mainframe systems with respect to offloaded I/O function. In the 1960s IBM designed the 360 to use Channels (I/O subsystems) to perform I/O independently of the CPU. When soon after they introduced the first PC they tried to improve their I/O performance with their MicroChannel adapter, but it required high-precision clocking and was expensive to produce, so never got into competition.
Channel architecture allows the mainframe CPU to pass just device information and main memory buffer address to the channel, then continue running other tasks until the channel interrupts when its I/O operation is completed. I presume that these smartNICs/IPUs/DPUs will provide something similar to IBM's Channel subsystem?
Heh. Your article's title says "Electrical engineers...", but the article body talks mostly about Elecronics engineers. I suspect that both are endangered species these days; the Electrical engineers (producers of the electric power grid, building wiring, etc) as well as those who produce the hardware on which our software runs. I suppose that the only hardware "Electronics" engineers that are still thriving are the folks who work at chip foundries.
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