Posts by Ilsa Loving

Google submits Go apps container project to Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Go won't survive

Ever since the debacle that was AngularJS (specifically, they way they tossed v1 in the garbage and came out with v2 that was completely different), I have been distrustful of any language that Google might come out with. Google treats its languages with the same distaste as it treats all its other products. ie: badly. I don't have the time to learn an entirely new language every couple weeks cause the previous widget isn't cool anymore.

Their entire collective workforce has a worse attention span than a single squirrel hopped up on amphetamines.

Oracle VirtualBox 7.0 is here – just watch out for the proprietary Extension Pack

Too high risk

Yeah no thanks. I would rather pay money for a commercial product than trust Oracle's "open source" booby traps. Having to be afraid that Oracle will come knocking on your door for a stupid amount of money is not worth the risk.

That they track all their downloads by IP, and if they can identify you, they will send their rabid attack dogs at you. Doesn't matter if it was a thoughtless mistake. Doesn't matter if you're not actually using it. Be ready to cough up $~10k

Much better off using KVM or QEMU, or commercial.

Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing

It's wrong, but I can't be bothered to go into all the reasons why.

His argument basically boils down to "I want to code like _X_, but rust won't let me, therefore it sucks.".

I deplore this kind of attitude from developers. The decisions made /w Rust have nothing to do with the developer, and everything to do with development as a long-term effort.

Good

This can't happen soon enough.

The pendulum has swung way too far towards the "developer convenience" side and away from the "quality" side. Sloppy, poorly thought out software has gotten sloppier and more poorly thought out with each passing year, and there are way too many self-taught developers who think "runs" equates to "done".

Shoehorning extra safety features (or yet another "framework"... *shudder*) onto existing languages can never solve the problem, because it doesn't stop developers from ignoring those features and doing it wrong anyway.

The single biggest advantage of rust is that, by default, it doesn't let you get away with _anything_. No ridiculous untyped variables. No incomplete conditionals. No memory manipulation nonsense. Sensible crate management.

In short: The language has sensible default requirements, and if you want to stray away from that, you need to go out of your way to do that. That's as opposed to basically every other language out there that requires developers to code defensively to protect from the languages failings. And heaven forbid the developer doesn't know how to do that, because you end up with a code base rife with ticking time bombs.

Rust may hurt developer "velocity" in the short term, but the long term means dramatically reduced maintenance cycles, bugs, and headaches in general.

Python tops programming love list – but if you want a job, learn SQL

SQL is a skills shortcut

I've found that knowledge of SQL seems to serve as a marker for how skilled a developer is.

Basic SQL is comically easy to understand. Even if you struggle with cross products and whatnot, a basic join is trivial.

So now if someone says, for example, that they use mongodb cause sql is too hard, they immediately go into my "This person shouldn't be allowed near a computer" group and go on full defence because it's all but guaranteed that their code is going to be absolute crap. If they haven't taken the time to even try learning SQL, they most certainly haven't taken the time to learn other critical aspects of software best practices either.

I have yet to come across one single person that hasn't fit that pattern.

The same person that does "SELECT * on $TABLE_WITH_MILLIONS_OF_ROWS" without a WHERE clause, is the same person that will do idiotic things like take a user's input and inject it into an INSERT statement without even trying to sanitize or escape it first.

Re: "SQL coders"

There's nothing wrong with stored procedure per se. It's just that like any tool, it can be misused.

If you're dumping a bunch of complex business logic into your stored procedures, or writing a 1000 line SP with some absurd multi-level recursive query, you're doing something very wrong.

ServiceNow: Customers 'struggling to understand the value of ELAs', says Gartner

Call it what it is - Gouging

Despite all the flowery language to make it all sound sophisticated and complex, the entire article can be summed up in a single sentence: ServiceNow has locked-in their customer base, and now they've moved to the "gouging" phase of the relationship.

Apparently they took a look at what Oracle is doing, rubbed their hands together in glee and said "Ooooh we need some of that."

LibreOffice improves Microsoft compatibility with version 7.4

Can Impress do OpenGL presentations yet?

For the longest time, I've periodically checked Impress to see if the opengl-based tools works and always leave disappointed. I think it might work on Windows, but as I try very hard to avoid Windows (I mean, if you're on windows you may as well just use ms office) and the opengl subsystem has been an unmitigated failure on both Linux as well as Mac.

I don't bother checking anymore. If they haven't gotten it working by now, I have no confidence that they ever will.

Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'

Re: Burn

Considering that almost none of the 45 billion he's offering is actually his own money, I am really really hoping that things get downright cannibalistic.

Re: Where is the ROI?

What never ceases to amaze me is the sheer level of projection slung by rightwingers.

The overwhelming majority of crap on not just twitter but all social media, come from distinctly right-wing sources. Russian botnets. Anti-vaxxers. Trump Supporters. "Libertarians". ALL of this is massively right-wing.

While there are plenty of malcontents on the left, it's the equivalent of a leftist brandishing a knife at someone, vs the right nuking a major metropolitan city.

Re: Where is the ROI?

What you say makes perfect sense. That being said, every single thing you said is _entirely irrelevant_.

It also completely ignores the subtext of all this. He did all this because twitter pisses him off and he's using the stock market to punish them by illegally manipulating it.

But in his arrogance he overplayed his hand. Musk committed to buying twitter, and he chose to skip due dilligence. He is obligated to complete the deal, at the price stated. PERIOD.

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

I think that phrase is just wonderful. In one sentence, you know everything you need to about the person who uttered it.

The march of Macs into the enterprise: Demand is on the increase

Re: Apple don't care for the enterprise

Why in the name of god are you using IMAP with Office 365? You should be using the appropriate exchange connector.

Re: Apple don't care for the enterprise

I've never had an issue with any of these things, and I ran my own mail server right up until I decided it wasn't worth the effort anymore and got myself an exchange account. No issues at all with MFA.

Re: Workforce Demographics

Apple actually bought an MDM company, Fleetsmith, but good gravy is it crap. (At least, at the time I was evaluating it). There are numerous third party solutions that are infinitely better including Jumpcloud, jamf, Addigy, etc, depending on what your needs are.

There are definitely some hooks missing in MacOS that one would expect, especially if you're used to Windows MDM, but IMO it's definitely good enough for enterprise use.

Re: Workforce Demographics

You don't, because you're not supposed to.

The single biggest annoyance was wiping a machine when giving it to a new user, which Apple finally solved with Monterey.

But everything else should be handled via MDM. This is also how Windows machines should be managed, BTW. Centralized management of Apple hardware still isn't at the level you can get with MS, but it's catching up.

Everything should be MDM now. If you're still imaging machines manually, you're doing it wrong.

Re: I can see the appeal. Walled garden,

You can be completely accurate but still very misleading.

You act as if registering with Apple is a bad thing. You don't need to sell your application through the app store, but if you think it is unreasonable to require developers to code sign their software, you're one of the reasons why security has gone to hell in the past couple decades.

The computer industry has turned into a wild west that the average computer user has zero hope of surviving.

If you want to install/run an app that hasn't been certified, you can do so easily by doing right-click->open. It's beyond trivial. If something like that is too advanced for a user to perform, then by definition that user does not have the skills required to vet whether a piece of software is safe to use.

I agree that it's annoying how Apple has locked down the hardware, but I've reach the point in my life where I just don't give a shit. My sanity is a precious commodity, and I'm just not willing to spend the spoons necessary to babysit my computer that can go belly up by just looking at it wrong. So, Apple it is. Hardware lock-in aside, Apple's platform is the best compromise I am aware of between flexibility, security, and ease of use.

China puts Walmart in the naughty corner, citing 19 alleged cybersecurity 'violations'

Poor product quality?

I guess this means they have to stop selling Chinese manufactured products?

Never mind the Panic button – there's a key to Compose yourself

On Mac

On a Mac, the standard keys don't repeat the way they do on PCs. Instead, if you hold the key down, and that character has variations, you just hold the key down. And Vôîłä, Åll thē vårįatįòñš you could want. Well, almost all. Some of the hungarian vowels are missing.

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

I can't remember if I've heard of this guy before, but just from the quotes posted I can already say I really like him.

Pop!_OS 21.10: Radical distro shows potential but does not play nicely with others

Hilarious comments

So many comments from people avoiding an entire distro just because of the bootloader.

Really? That's your biggest concern about an OS? The bootloader? Not the hardware support? Not whether it helps you be more productive?

Seriously people, who CARES about the god damned bootloader.

Does it work /w a 4k screen? Can it successfully suspend/resume? It's 2021 and linux _still_ has problems with that!

I tried PopOS on a dell laptop and it was the single best distribution I had used to date, simply because it properly supported the hotkeys and other various laptop features without me having to spend several days googling and futzing with config files.

Here's an idea... instead of caring so much about a stupid bootloader that has very little material impact in your computer use, how about care about the fact linux still can't properly handle seamless switching from integrated to discrete graphics without having to re-login!

What? Apple products need management?! Cupertino intros device management for SMBs

Re: Looks like a rehashed version of ABM

Except that this is also offering some basic MDM functionality, which ABM does not. ABM is all but useless for anything major without a 3rd party MDM attached to it.

If they did, I hope they've made major improvements. When I evaluated Fleetsmith for our own use, it was shockingly disappointing. Ended up going with Addigy.

Angular 13 arrives: Ivy everywhere, View Engine and IE11 support cut

*yawn*

I was a bit fan of Angular until they hit v2 and basically told everyone that all the effort they put into learning Angular has been for nothing.

It's been off my radar ever since. I have better things to do with my time than relearn the same language over and over.

Judge tosses NEC's claim that Oracle salespeople tricked it into using the wrong software license prior to audit

The real news here...

The real news here is that any company is still stupid enough to use Oracle in the first place.

Oracle has been actively and aggressively screwing it's customers for years. I long ago decided that it doesn't matter how powerful their database is... it's just not worth the risk to even glance in their direction.

.NET Foundation boss apologizes for pull request that sparked community row

Re: What a shame

Isn't SourceForge that company that injects crapware into the installers of projects it hosts?

How not to train your Dragon: What happens when you teach an AI game sex-abuse stories then blame players

Too late

There's no way they'll be able to recover from this. They screwed up too badly. The best thing would be for the investors to take back what cash they can.

Zoom-o-cracy: Wales MP misses vote, allowing COVID-passport rule change, blames the IT dept

Re: Controversial why?

>Was he really going to vote to let potentially infectious people, infect large crowds with their plague?

He's a conservative. Of course he's against sensible laws that protect people.

Well, he's part of the conservative party so calling him an idiot is redundant.

Fairphone makes wireless earbuds less foul, by charging batteries carefully

No North America

It's disappointing that they don't ship to the US. I would love to get one.

If your head's not in the cloud, you're not in the right place

Re: Sounds like a cry for help.

There are different perspectives. Accounting-wise, going cloud is seen as "cheaper" because it's an operating cost rather than a capital cost. So it looks better on the balance sheet. None of depreciation stuff to worry about.

From an infrastructure perspective, cloud provides a level of flexibility you just can't do on-prem. For example, say you're a tax company. For 1 months out of the year, you need a fleet of high powered superservers to handle the load, but then for the other 12, you could almost handle the traffic on just a raspberry pi. With on-prem, you need to own those superservers all year round, despite only needing them for 1 month.

From an operations perspective, the big benefit to cloud isn't the technology, but what the technology facilitates. Cloud practically forces you to adopt zero trust policies. Properly done, it allows you to create more fault-tolerant architecture without much effort. Setting up pipelines to rebuild entire services from scratch. Distributed access, eliminating the need for VPN and centralized networks that if compromised, would allow unfettered access to everything.

Cloud is tied very tightly to DevOps. Creating an on-premise cloud with proper pipelines would allow you to, for example, rebuild your entire on-premise infrastructure automatically in AWS if your main data centre ever got destroyed.

Fix network printing or keep Windows secure? Admins would rather disable PrintNightmare patch

What is affected?

One bit of information that seems to be hard to find is, what is the configuration necessary to allow this to happen?

Specifically, it sounds like this only applies to machines that have shared printing available. Most businesses now have printers with built-in networking capabilities, so there is no reason to be using the shared printer facilities in Windows, and so can (and should) be safely disabled. Am I misunderstanding something?

Faster .NET? Monster post by Microsoft software engineer shows serious improvements

Re: Too little too late too cumbersome?

Rust is the first language I've seen in decades that actually gave me a sense of delight. I agree that there's a lot of maturing to do, and I'm not sure I agree with all the design decisions, but on the whole it's the closest I've seen to being a true replacement to C.

Their variable ownership mechanism alone is revolutionary.

What is GitOps? This is the technical introduction you've been looking for

For the love of...

This is well past ridiculous. How many more *Ops marketing terms are people going to invent for every damn thing?

I suppose I should at least take solace in the fact that somebody finally realized that developers coding applications are NOT qualified to create the deployment environment. The whole DevOps bruhaha is a security nightmare for exactly that reason.

Say helloSystem: Mac-like FreeBSD project emits 0.5 release

Re: More than enough

And that's exactly why security is necessary. Decent security will, if not block the malware in the first place, at least minimize the damage it causes and let you audit what was affected so it can be cleaned up.

And it's not even "ignorant users". It could also be a very knowledgable user who just happened to not have enough coffee that morning. Crap happens.

I concur with the grandparent. Not having even basic security is flat out idiotic and I won't go near this thing, no matter how nice it looks.

There was a crooked man who bought a crooked M1 iMac, and we presume they lived together in a little crooked house

"Here's a piece of paper you can slip under one corner. Now stop wasting my time."

So... The M1 iMac is pretty good then?

I'm sorry but the only people who are going to notice a 0.1mm (that's one tenth of one millimetre) are people who have had eye transplants from bald eagles. I mean, take a ruler and look at how long 1 millimetre is. It's pretty darn small. I can almost accept someone noticing a half millimetre tilt, but a 0.1mm tilt? I'm sorry no. Furthermore, I'd like to see a comparison between these iMacs and other monitors out there. I'm willing to bet a weeks worth of Tim Hortons that this is completely normal across all monitors.

This smacks of "looking for any excuse at all to disparage Apple", and it's really pathetic. Apple has more than plenty of actual legitimate and consequential failings that to argue over something so idiotic accomplishes nothing but muddy the waters and take focus away from real issues (such as their hostility to self-repair).

Apple's macOS 12 adds improved virtualization though no sign of anything like Boot Camp on M1 silicon

Re: No one needs Bootcamp anymore

So wait, you're running a Windows/Intel game on Windows/Arm, under Parallels on MacOS.

The fact that it's playable at all is actually pretty darn cool!

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

Minority report architecture

The only way to be sure would be to have at least 2 cores doing the same calculation each time. If they disagreed, run the calculation again. Alternatively you could have 3 cores doing the same calculation and if there's one core wrong then majority wins.

Or we finally move to a completely new technology like maybe optical chips.

Too easy. Microsoft introduces moderation for Winget package repo after spike in bad submissions

Typical Microsoft

They focus on onboarding new developers onto their platform as fast as possible, with quality being a distant second place.

Without exception, every single technology that makes it 'easy' for wannabe programmers to get on board has resulted in catastrophic consequences. Hideous quality code, ridiculous libraries, terrible documentation documentation... the complications are endless.

And then people are surprised that the incidence of vulnerabilities are shooting through the roof.

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

Fix the company, or get a pen

One time we had a major failure (I can't remember exactly what the problem was now...) that had brought down the entire company. I was feverishly working to fix it, and even people who came buy to offer encouragement saw the look on my face and made a 180.

My desk sat not too far from where we kept the stationary, and cue one of the Einsteins of the company who was wandering around looking at stuff, occasionally looking at me. At one point we made eye contact and I shook my head in a very obvious "No" gesture. Apparently that didn't deter him because after another dozen seconds of looking about, he came over to me.

"I need a pen."

You know how you have 5 million little pieces of infrastructure floating in your head as you're connecting the dots, troubleshooting, etc., and that even a brief interruption makes it all go *pop*?

The entire floor heard my very profanity-laden monologue as I tore him so many new ones he (figuratively) couldn't have been recognised as human afterwards.

The Epic vs Apple trial is wrapping up, but the battle has just begun

Knock on effect

This seems to me to potentially have far larger ramifications, similar to Google vs Oracle. Regardless of which way this goes, I believe this is going to affect all closed marketplaces, such as traditional game console companies.

Oracle sues Envisage claiming unauthorized database use amid licensing crackdown

Are they nuts?

Who in their right mind would willingly choose Oracle for basic database functionality anymore? Unless you are doing something very specialized that can only be served by Oracle's tools (unlikely), using *anything* by Oracle is extremely risky.

Open-source developers under corporate pressure to adopt less-permissive licenses, Percona CEO says

Stupid question

IANAL so I have no idea how well this would fly, but is it not possible to create a new license that specifically forbids companies that meeting certain criteria from taking their software and reselling it as a could service without compensation? Companies with revenues >$1b or something?

Google Docs users, you are on notice: Code rewrite may break browser extensions

Re: One browser to rule them all

Ok, saying Oracle is better than Google, Microsoft or Apple is just insanity. Oracle is very well known for screwing everyone and everything, to such an extent that Microsoft looks downright altruistic.

They are particularly fond of setting very aggressive licensing traps where they give you access to all features of their products, and then when you use them, not realizing they cost extra, they swoop in with contract penalties that are mindboggling punitive. But they will be "nice enough" to not charge those fees if you decide to buy all these extra products you don't want or need.

There may have been problems with the JEDI deal but you still wouldn't have won, Oracle told by US govt

Anyone but Oracle

Hasn't the US gov sued Oracle for abusing past contracts?

Microsoft's Edge browser for Linux hits the Beta Channel ... if you're into that kind of thing

No Thanks

I remember when they had Internet Explorer for Solaris. It was during the first browser wars when they were up against Netscape. Once Microsoft won, suddenly they dropped support for all platforms other than windows.

Once bitten, twice shy...

Report: World's population of developers expands, JavaScript reigns, C# overtakes PHP

Re: Ermm. nope!

Javascript isn't a language. It's the result of a dog eating it's own poop and then throwing it up again, that someone then put in a box and managed to sell to a crackhead.

Pigeon fanciers in a flap over Brexit quarantine flock-up, seek exemption from EU laws

Seriously?

Brexit happened, and the world is not only in the middle of a pandemic but at a very dangerous phase of it. They'll just have to suck it up.

These people are really for the birds to even be asking.

SQL now a dirty word for Oracle, at least in cloudy data warehouses

Re: More work not less for DBA's - well for a while

You're right, but low code solutions exacerbate the problem by enabling these people. I have the same complaint regarding all these "easy to get started" languages, Javascript in particular.