Posts by Robert Halloran

VMware defends ending downloads of SDK that helps VM backups – or migrations to rivals

panic in the Broadcom boardroom?

Suspect Broadcom expected migrations to be painful and lengthy, giving them time to squeeze some added blood fom this particular stone. On that basis they could care less about making it simple since it wasn't a flood of large corp's headed for the exit door.

Now they're in court vs. Tesco, AT&T etc, while their competitors are hollowing out their customer base like termites in a lumber yard. They suddenly need to staunch this particular wound to give them time to properly milk their acquisition dry before they kick it to the curb, vs. their customers doing it for them.

Zero Fs given here for Hock Tan & Co; let them see the downside for a change.

VMware swings its focus back to low-end server virt, promises vSphere Standard upgrade

Re: VMware: The trust is already broken

As others have said, the issue is more about trust in the vendor over technical capabilities, and at this point Broadcom has none. This new action reviving Standard is simply an attempt to hold onto some of the fleeing customer base. It may be an option for some firms to provide time to bridge them over to Some Other Vendor.

The other vendors jumping into the void left by Broadcom's actions may not cover 100% of the technical, but they're hungry, and the extra cash coming in from those bailing on Broadcom should help them catch up technically.

Don't take the bait, folks; they're only trying to get the hook set back in...

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

UNIX copyrights

As is well known , UNIX came from AT&T, but after the telco breakup, they unsuccessfully tried to market their own computers (I was there late 80s..), and eventually joined forces with Novell to create Unixware and Unix System Labs (visited the Summit NJ site a few times), then eventually sold their half *to* Novell (Dennis Ritchie quoted the OT verse about Esau selling his birthright at the time; RIP sir...).

Santa Cruz Operation was an ISV that did an x86 port of the legacy-AT&T code; when Novell began to flounder in the wake of WinNT, they tried to buy out the copyrights but couldn't come up with the cash; Novell gave them the business of collecting the royalties from all the other licensees and keeping a 5% admin fee.

Linux started eating the *ix-on-Intel market, Santa Cruz did a deal with IBM to port UNIX to Itanium (Itanic...) which went nowhere. It was then bought out by a Novell spinoff Caldera, which rebranded itself as SCO. IBM invoked the buyout clause of their joint contract to take their code & walk. It eventually ended up in AIX, along with some code from Sequent etc.

SCO/Caldera continued to flounder, then decided to sue IBM for infringement despite the techs telling the suits there was nothing to go after. It's dragged on for years now, and Xinuos eventually bought out the dwindling software business and left the bankruptcy trustee to continue the lawsuit. Apparently they haven't had any better luck in the market and opened their own case a few years back claiming infringement. They haven't had any better luck. Hopefully the Nazgul Horde will shortly eliminate them once and for all.

Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

some incentives..

I've worked for a Large Financial Firm in the US for some years now (retiring this month...). Post-pandemic they tried to hire on the proviso of five days in-office, and strangely enough had few takers. They backed off to three onsite/two WFH and had far better success. My existing team is spread out across three time zones in the US and an offshore group in South Asia to handle the overnight hours.

I suspect at least in the case of banks/brokers/etc with a large stake of real-estate holdings they're seeing the falloff in core-city leases and getting nervous about longer-term trends. With good-enough connectivity available most places, you don't need to lease space for bums in seats, and a competent management chain can handle a distributed staff. Welcome to the new reality...

Tesco is sprinting to quit VMware and Broadcom despite rapid migration risks

>> They're going to get little to no new business though when it's well known in the industry that they think they can behave like Oracle, and their competitors will be aggressively marketing their own products in comparison.

They already are; ref any number of PR pieces at this site. The bump in business they're getting from the corp's fleeing VMWare is simply letting them catch up on those niche features VMWare claims you must have and "those alternatives" don't (yet...).

Wonder with all this how much longer Broadcom will be able to squeeze blood from this particular turnip...

no skin in this one but..

Given that Broadcom ended up settling with the Deathstar (a former employer..) and given the press these cases are getting, the C-suite types have to wonder if they bit off a bit too much buying out VMWare to squeeze its customer base for a few bucks/quid/euros/... until said customers could migrate off to another VM platform (and at this point the competitors are just getting better with the added business).

Hopefully Tesco & Siemens are able to thump Broadcom in the courtroom and cast further doubt on the wisdom of so thoroughly antagonizing your customer base .

SQL Server may be too lucrative for Microsoft to ditch, but too legacy to love

which bucket do they want to collect in?

At this point, seems like they're more interested in selling CPU cycles on Azure than on-prem DB with SQL Server, and as the article mentions, they're playing catch-up feature-wise. Don't see it going away anytime soon, but it may well be left to languish as other cloudy options keep improving.

MyPillow must decide whether to be firm or soft as ransomware crims demand pay

Waiting for the finger-pointing

by Lindell claiming the ransomware hack was done by the Democratic (non-MAGAt) party here in the States to make him look bad (worse?)

QUIC will soon be as important as TCP – but it's vastly different

Re: Meditations from a traveller on the road to Babble

This was a great purpose to the old Interop conferences back in the 80s: all the vendor booths got an assortment of network drops (coax, 10/100baseT, FDDI, etc) and they *had* to connect to the show-floor network as part of the vendor agreement.

Non-compliant TCP stacks were sussed out in VERY short order and the vendor/s in question subjected to public shaming by their competitors and their (lost) potential customers. There were a few cases of vendors being physically pulled from the network for packet flooding, etc, at which point they usually packed their bags and slunk off into the night...

'Death sentence': EU cloud lobby takes Broadcom to Brussels over VMware partner purge

Re: VMWare is noncompetitive.

Your title says it all: between external cloud providers, the push for containerization and the availability of Good Enough alternative VM stacks, Broadcom is at this point wringing the turnip for the last drops of blood before the market finishes their migrations and kicks VMware to the curb for good regardless. The price gouging and cutoff of partner programs is both an added twist of the root veggie for their bottom line and an incentive for the customer base to get on with their migration work.

Dear Oracle, we need to talk about the future of MySQL

Re: Where does MariaDB figure in this?

>> Java (which now has a per-seat licensing scheme if you want to use the official Java software)

At this point Oracle's build is YA spin on OpenJDK with a few add-ons they claim provide better performance. Given who we're talking about I take this statement with an K2-sized salt lick...

Bork ventures to the Middle of Lidl

"Aisle of Dreams"?

No Lidl stores in this part of the US (southeastern), though Aldi is scooping up various vacant storefronts & developing a footprint here.

The euphemism here for The Aisle seems to be "Aisle of Shame"; stuff you really don't need but can't help dropping into your cart.

Lawsuit seeks to probe Uncle Sam's role in ICE-tracking app takedowns

hmmm...

Given the USian preoccupation with firearms, and the specious "guns don't kill people" BS, how can they then justify an app that simply reports where 47's thugs might be found? It's not suggesting violence against them, just spotting them on a map...

VMware reboots its partner program again – and it looks like smaller players are out

Re: and history repeats its self as Broadcom unloads both barrels into both feet again

Seems like Broadcom's accelerating their less-than-enterprise size customers' run for the door.

Problem with that, as said by others, is that the remaining Big Players will see the uncertainty, the reduced availability of admins who trained up on the previously-cheap/free versions, the likelihood of increased costs as the customer pool contracts (hey the big money has to come from *somewhere*...), and accelerate their own run for the doors.

Prediction: Broadcom squeezes the life out of VMWare within five years, except for a handful of slow-to-migrate corps, and jettisons the zombified remains to some vulture capital outfit.

VMware’s rivals ramp up their efforts to create alternative stacks

Re: Shame on Broadcom

As was said in the original piece, the "VMWare equivalents" have been given a huge boost by corp's wanting to punt Broadcom to the curb given the cost increases. Most of these will have "a decent team of techies" to smooth over transitions, and the cash influx from fleeing customers should give the competitors leverage to finish the catch-up work.

You've already found a Good Enough replacement for your needs, and with a little work (and likely some transitional time spent In The Clouds) the alternatives are likely to reach parity, since it's unlikely Broadcom will be doing any serious investment in R&D at this point, they're too busy squeezing the remaining customer base before everyone's migration is done and VMWare is discarded as a relic.

Re: Play stupid games, wins stupid prizes

>> (If I was a betting small furry creature from Alpha Centuri, and I am, then I would follow any project that has nice on premises feel but integrates well with Terraform, et al and so offers cloud management capabilities as well. That's where the money will be)

On that basis, given that Red Hat's VMs-in-Openshift, Ansible & Terraform all now fall under the Big Blue Umbrella, ...

Add that Openshift is simply their spin on K8S so it moves well between in-house & public clouds.

VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules

As has been said previously, Broadcom will jettison VMware as soon as enough of the base have migrated away to leave the remaining business as unprofitable. The carcass will have been sufficiently bled out at that time which was the point to begin with.

Deal to 'save' UK colleges £45M in Oracle Java licensing fees followed audit requests

Re: Oh FFS

>>are there technical or proprietary reasons why organizations have to use Oracle instead of others or is it just that the downloaders default to Oracle?

A lot of Oracle's app products for financials etc, run Java-based admin GUIs and choke if you attempt to run them on non-Oracle JVMs.

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

I've gone with the Keychron Q10; solid aluminum body (2.1 kg) , good feel to the keys, easily remapped with the usual QMK firmware.

Judge orders Feds rehire workers falsely fired for lousy performance

typical GOP double-standard

Meanwhile, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed late in 2020 a month before *that* Presidential election, McConnell couldn't wait for the body to cool before announcing they'd push through Trump's nomination (Amy Coney Barrett) before The Other Party won and flipped the scales.

"Moscow Mitch" has since chosen to retire next year after seeing the unbridled shitshow his party has become under Drumpf part 2.

Wozniak: I didn't reduce chip count for manufacturing. I wanted to prove I was clever

These days, piece-parting something together out of a bare CPU & discrete TTL logic is barely worth the effort other than showing off your soldering / breadboard skills. Back in The Day being able to get anything together that was functional was an achievement in itself.

That Woz can walk around with a Pi Zero in his pocket as a honeypot would have left him gobsmacked in those same halcyon days of hardware hacking. The fun these days is working out how best to leverage the cheap-as-chips (pun intended...) hardware now readily at hand...

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Re: You are missing the point.

I give Elmo credit for backing EVs, and setting up the Supercharger network so drivers are willing to take them on road trips.

That said the 'legacy' carmakers are catching up, with economies of scale he can't match, and the Asian companies like BYD, Vinfast, etc have a decided advantage in labor costs so he's riding on a rapidly declining image (given his recent actions the wags are labeling his vehicles as 'swastikars'). That ridiculous payout package he wanted from the Tesla shareholders was obviously his attempt to cash out before the bubble burst.

It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

Re: "License ARM..."

MS has tried other platforms before: remember NT was available on Alpha & Itanium before they threw it in and fell back to Intel/AMD. More recently their spectacular failure to promote their ARM-based Surface slabs. The 'long tail' of Windows apps that ran poorly if at all in emulation has pretty well put paid to that idea for the general market.

Now their Cunning Plan (apologies to Rowan Atkinson) is to get you to run everything in their cloud and just reach it from a thin client/browser on your tablet/handheld. That the majority of Azure VMs are in fact running on some Linux flavor is irrelevant as they're getting paid for the cycles regardless of what OS is burning through them.

HashiCorp unveils 'Terraform 2.0' while tiptoeing around Big Blue elephant in the room

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

Actually wouldn't mind seeing some more official tie-ins between Terraform & Ansible post-merger

Research suggests more than half of VMware customers are looking to move

Re: Options

If you look at the comments above, there's any number of users who've successfully told VMware/Broadcom to get stuffed and have moved to exactly the open-source-based systems you're pooh-poohing.

I'm sure there's some edge-case features in VMware that Proxmox/Nutanix/Red Hat aren't providing (yet...) but the extra business they're getting should let them build up to cover them. As it is it looks like the alternatives cover some large swath of those customers looking to jump ship.

Re: Open source replacements not good enough ?

This is the sort of response (the competition is Good Enough...) that should have the Broadcom suits in a collective coronary.

What *should* happen as small/medium operations take advantage of that is said competition expanding to cover the edge cases that are scaring off the bigger fish from following along: virtuous cycle?

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

Back to "booth babes", really?

You'd think in These Enlightened Days the idea of stationing "booth babes" in tight/short outfits to help draw the presumably-male gaze to your products would be gone.

Guess not.

Broadcom’s VMware strategy looks ever more shaky - and less relevant

abundance of options

For enterprise customers already in the RHEL ecosystem, they've extended their K8S offering to include the KubeVirt bundle to allow running full VMs there. For larger shops already working in containers, this may offer an off-ramp from Virtzilla's impending price gouges.

Broadcom throws VMware customers on perpetual licenses a lifeline

VMWare has been the default virtualization system for years, but given Broadcom's efforts to squeeze their enterprise customers, the rise of multiple alternatives like Proxmox & Nutanix, the push for containerization and the move to external cloud hosting, Broadcom may be finding their move is driving off those major customers in job lots and warp speed.

H-1B visa fraud alive and well amid efforts to crack down on abuse

Gamed from both ends..

There's not only shenanigans about applicants for H-1Bs, but since there's a requirement that companies post jobs domestically before resorting to offshore help, there's also a cottage industry to help Big Corp craft said job req's to preclude any US applicants from meeting the requirements, at which point the corp's are regretfully forced to go offshore for the talent.

Echo the previous comments about bringing in H-1Bs for entry-level helldesk & coding gigs which could be done by any recent graduates of high school/community college. But *those* folks want a working wage and could jump ship for better pay whenever it suits them.

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

Re: "best in the US"

>> DC has two airports

>Three airports if we count BWI.

True enough: not much further from downtown DC than Dulles and *it's* served by both the DC/Baltimore commuter rail and the Amtrak NE Corridor line for their non-express trains.

Re: "best in the US"

Outside of the Boston-Washington DC corridor, the population density for effective passenger rail just isn't there in the US. The main cities along that route also have the local mass transit to move people

to/from the depot to their final destination. The comments above re: shifting mail traffic to air over rail definitely apply.

Re: Google "Amtrak Auto Train"

Cost for one-way is roughly $300/vehicle & $100/person for an 850 mi/1400 km run. Approx. travel time 17 hours with one train each northbound/southbound daily. No in-between stops.

Given the route parallels the I-95 corridor along the US east coast, and can be driven in a little under 12 hours, the demand is pretty specific for people out of the Bos-Wash megaplex headed to the FL theme parks and wanting to avoid dealing with traffic. As with passenger rail in general, the distances across the US and the availability of cheap airfare discourages usage (DC - Orlando airfares available for $120 one-way)

Re: "best in the US"

DC has two airports: Reagan National (formerly Washington Nat'l) just across the Potomac River from the District proper, which is restricted to shorter-haul flights, and Dulles 25 mi/40 km out into Virginia for long-haul/int'l flights. When I worked there late 70s the Metro did service National but the suburban rail line out into Virginia ended about 6 mi/10 km short of Dulles. This was seen by people as a Bad Plan as this made Dulles harder to get to/from, and the existing track was running down the road's median but ended short of the airport. I see they've finally corrected that so you can go all the way out.

Broadcom boss Hock Tan acknowledges 'some unease' among VMware community

Re: Way to go : Tan

>> The plans are for VirtualBox to replace VMWare in almost all my clients.

a) VirtualBox is meant as an end-user product b) Broadcom has announced the end-user products are being sold off to ??? c) Businesses using ESXi are generally looking at Proxmox or Nutanix as alternatives

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

Ongoing ORCL problems --> squeezing customers?

Big corps are evaluating/going to Other Databases with friendlier terms, more than a few of their app suite projects have gone sideways (see other headlines on this site), their cloud business has come up day-late-$MONEY-short vs AWS/Azure/Google/etc, and their ongoing efforts to monetize Java have only accelerated adoption of OpenJDK and its derivatives. Their latest quarterly earnings came up short of market expectations as a result of all this so it seems their only option is squeezing the existing customer base for added licensing money?

Huge DDoS attack against US financial institution thwarted

Election-related?

Screwing on my tinfoil hat good & tight, given the US presidential elections coming up next year, could this be dirty tricks by some nation-state actor looking to show "Those Guys" can't protect their peoples' finances, therefore you should re-install their Useful Idiot ?

ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance

Design-by-committee vs. design-by-developers

Given the historical success of ITU "standards" in the past (X.400, X.500, the ISO protocol stack implementations) vs. the IETF counterparts (SMTP, LDAP, TCP/UDP/IP), I'd like to think there's little to worry about. Having worked some years in a Former US Telecom Monopoly firm, the mindset of "rough consensus & running code" is anathema to many gov-based entities.

John Deere urged to surrender source code under GPL

Re: why is it so hard to follow a simple license?

Which is why groups like SFC, backed by some of the heavyweights in OSS-based code such as Red Hat & Google, are a help because they *have* the resources to push back on stubborn corp's playing stubborn about following the rules.

Fedora 38 will still support framebuffer X11 and NIS+

>> One of the things that helped kill NIS+ (beyond the complexity) is the Sun Directory Server. Now some of that code lives on in the 389 Server project.

"Sun Directory Server" was rebranding of the Netscape Directory Server (written in part by Tim Howes who co-wrote the LDAP spec) they acquired when Sun & AOL jointly took down the Mighty Mozilla late 90s. When "iPlanet" broke up a few years after, AOL took their copy of said code and eventually released it to the world as the 389 Server.

Gartner: Oracle probes orgs for Java compliance after new licensing terms

At this point Red Hat, IBM & Microsoft all offer no-cost support for OpenJDK on their respective platforms. Unless your procurement crew insists on a single "throat to choke at 0300" for such things, why in the name of Everything Round would you continue to pay the Danegeld to Oracle?

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: Are you ok?

Vanilla AT&T UNIX didn't include TCP/IP networking until late in the System V series after it merged in Sun's BSD-based code. It was a common add-on by third parties as a selling point.

If you look at source from the day, you'll see IfDefine statements for a shedload of *IX variants because there were that many versions with differing options based on what that build had/hadn't optioned in.

Wonder why Xinuos dropped their BSD-based update to SCO-the-undead's OpenServer; licensing problems after they resurrected their parent's lawsuit?

Foxconn shows off pair of EVs, boasts of bulk orders for last year's model

I've debated a plug-in as the next vehicle buy, but all the ones I've seen to date seem to give you around 30 miles/50 km on the battery before you're back on the ICE; helps the fuel economy numbers but doesn't seem all that compelling. May as well make the fuel tank a bit bigger and be done with it.

The two items that seem to be on potential buyers' minds here in the States are how far you can go on a charge (the specs here line up well with what's already available) and how quickly you can recharge (there's a big push for DC fast chargers to be set up at least along the major roadways to get you back on the road ASAP); nothing in the PR here about compatibility. Most of the newer EVs coming out for the US market are touting charge-up to the nominal 80% in the 15-20 minute timeframe via DCFC, which on a road trip gives you time to visit the facilities, grab some snacks for the next leg then be on your way. In practice most driving will happen locally and you'll charge up at home off the mains, but that occasional long haul is a show-stopper to many potential buyers.

BOFH: All hail the job cuts consultant

Re: Job hunting

>> Numerous times a consultant has come in with grandiose plans and lots of bells && whistles - which culminated in their receiving a senior (aka high paying) position in said company.

Saw this more than once; they come in as a senior exec, get their plans started with great announcements of good things Coming Real Soon, then get out before the issues start to show up and the Grand Plan runs into reality and craters.

They notch another firm on their CV, and move on to some other firm; lather rinse repeat...

You can easily secure America's e-voting systems tomorrow. Use paper – Bruce Schneier

Re: Instant Gratification

>> In the US there should be a delay, as people would still be voting on the west coast as the first results come in from earlier time zones.

Typically the initial results start coming in shortly after the polls close in a given state (optically scanned ballots allow for quick reporting of what was on the paper), This may have some marginal influence on voters further west where polls may still be open, but hasn't proven to be a game-changer in any elections I'm aware of.

[ There was a bit of a fuss a few years back when the pundits started reporting on Florida just after the polls closed in *most* of the state, which straddles Eastern & Central timezones, and the western panhandle region was still open. ]

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

Re: "Does this carpet pull up?" I ask.

Not the lift; the BofH will have locked the car at the top of the shaft and all Shannon will see on the doors opening is an empty void right before the feel of hands against the back...

SCO v. IBM settlement deal is done, but zombie case shuffles on elsewhere

Re: Am confused

If you look back, there was a case brought by Red Hat against SCOX effectively for libeling their software business as being tainted (Lanham Act), which got frozen when bankruptcy was declared. With the settlement, which apparently explicitly leaves out Red Hat as a participant, I wonder if there's a chance of restarting that case and clawing some of those millions back?

Dutch officials say Donald Trump really did protect his Twitter account with MAGA2020! password

Re: less than a month before no one has to care what appears on Trump’s Twitter feed ever again

While the Federal authorities may pass on the plethora of likely charges to avoid the appearance of political persecution, the state attorney in NY has been after Trump's companies for some years about taxable value of his properties there. He apparently quoted one number to the state tax authority and another larger number as collateral value for loans taken with Deutsche Bank shortly after.

And the President's pardon power only applies to Federal crimes, not state-level.

2024 may find him under house arrest if not doing the orange jumpsuit perpwalk.

Re: Gators!

a) I'm at the other end of the state (300 mi/450 km) from him and I don't want him here...

b) I learned after moving here 30 years back that any open freshwater bigger than a kiddie pool can be presumed to hold gators, and to never let your small pets or toddlers anywhere near waters' edge as a result. The tragic case of the child killed at Disney walking the lakefront with her parents comes to mind.