Posts by johnmc

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

Re: Audit checks

How to you like your MS Win 11 transition? Oh, you thought you had a choice? Some companies don't bother with checks and just force upgrades and new licensing terms in the process.

That perversion is deep.

"As with much of modern capitalism, it's full of perverse incentives, ..."

Yes and the core of it is owning vs subscription. That difference is at the core of the perversion itself. Nor does the issue lay solely with software. Way too many products today you simply don't 'own'.

Be careful where you install software, and who installs it

Re: Who is your customer?

Interesting. Way back when I was part of a team constructing Tempest class systems for a govt agency. We did not know who, just that is was govt. We loaded up the cabinets and assemblies into a company truck. Were instructed to arrive at an address just outside of DC. Turns out it was the parking lot of a KMart. We sat there for well over an hour. Finally two cars rolled up. The men asked for our drivers licenses and bill of lading.

The men returned from their vehicles and asked us to follow them in the truck. We end up at Langley. We were ushered into a area very much like you might see at an upscale auto dealership. We never unloaded the gear. Never installed anything. Never saw anything past the visiting area. Every once in a while some tech would come out and ask a few questions then disappear again. Q&A lasted for about 2 hours. They signed off on delivery, escorted us out and that was that. Craziest cloak and dagger I ever witnessed.

Yep

I retired out of a top name telco years ago. Usual exit plan -- keys, badges, accounts and passwords, disclosure restrictions, etc. Four months pass and my ex-manager calls. "Hey do you remember the password for system XXXXX? " 'Uh no. Even if I did I could not tell you based on my termination agreement." Amazing in itself as I had given a copy to them and the HR person. They lost the document....

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

Has anyone considered.....

... That maybe Microsoft has been sending a message and users keep ignoring it?

Programmer: "There I moved this over there, and the copy paste is borked."

Project Lead: "Great!"

Programmer: "You think this will make users quit?"

Project Lead: "Hope so. Ever since we flushed the Desktop unit they cut our support budget."

Seriously folks, Microsoft does not want to be in the desktop business anymore and it shows.

Re: Shame on you Microsoft. Windows 11=1 billion PC's of landfill crud, for absolutely no reason.

On release day go down to your local BestBuy and hand out free CDs of your Linux of choice as people approach the door. :)

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Prior art problem....

Well the fork in the road, may have to fork again. There is a prior art for the use of that name. There is an open source search engine tool by the name of glimpse. Didn't anyone on the fork team take the 5min it takes to do a name search? Apparently not.

I also note that the website has no means to contact someone about this name conflict. Moss or someone else on that team needs to reconsider the naming choice. Copyright battles are not pretty.

SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God, and not kill, commit adultery, steal, curse...

Re: I have a code of conduct

Human generations of late seem to prefer the explicit rather than implied form of social construction.

Linux kernel's Torvalds: 'I am truly sorry' for my 'unprofessional' rants, I need a break to get help

Yes Torvalds needs a break, but not for what many think. The project can't afford to lose the man to a heart attack.

I retired from IT after 40 years of development and project mgt. When I screwed up I got my a$$ royally chewed up. IT is not a business that runs on unicorns and rainbows. Its dog it dog the higher up you go. Torvalds chews on a few people? Get used to it.

It will get worse. When IT was confined to numbers, checks and invoices it was all fixable. Just a bug. But IT is now well on the way to interfacing with the physical. Bugs could get people killed. That is bugs are quickly becoming the basis for legal torts. There will be no margin for error. Don't be surprised some day when the equivalent of a PE stamp is required to release critical software components.

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

Worked for a telco, but long since retired. We had the contract to support the US Navy's telecom requirements on Ford Island, Hawaii. Big bucks.

The technical manager was told his services were no longer required. He punched out full retirement. A month later the company was in a panic. The contract required a specific set of technical expertise that could not be found elsewhere. Bottom line -- He came back with a 30% boost in pay, He got to keep his lump sum payout and they set the close on years of service to the date of severance forcing the company to pay him yet again in the future.

Ka Ching!

Sysadmin unplugged wrong server, ran away, hoped nobody noticed

Hayden, Pfffft. Where is the COLO manager???

Hayden may have been the agent, but the master mind was the COLO manager.

I worked for the #1 telco in the US for 25 years. Bunch of data ops firms before that. This disaster was laid down by lax management.

* Production is sited in one part of the center not hodpodged where s#$@% fits.

* Cords are in a locker or the whole unit is in a locked data cab.

* The only dink authorized to muck with infrastructure is the shift tech. They have strict procedures on HOW.

* If it can be screwed down it SHALL be screwed down.

I remember a telconference I attended. 4 VPs, 6 directors all of them screaming at each other for a system being down. 10min in I called the center manager offline and asked if I could talk with the shift operator. 10min after that with a bit of confessional it was determined that a V.35 cable had been knocked loose that had not been screwed down. Had it not been my habit to buy everyone beers whenever I was in their area we might have never known. And yes I lied about how it happened. It was not worth the witch hunt, battling the union rep and losing three good techs.

DJI strips out code badness, reveals some GPL odds 'n sods

Re: user freedom?

You miss the obvious -- Cars that humans have to drive are already 'hacked'.

Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers

When the participants to IPCC meetings stop jetting around the planet and use electronic conferencing instead; THEN I will believe that global warming is real.

Note to Mozilla: We don't get the Firefox billboards

Ok, but you forgot something....

Your comparison of business models forgot one item -- Firefox is free to use just like IE, Opera and Chrome. Unlike MS and Oracle going head to head on db product, with price a determining factor that part of the equation is not evident in the browser mix. So when price is off the table and support might only be a minimal factor, what is left but brand awareness?

You might call it guilt. But the browser space is one of those few components of the IT landscape where marketing/brand is probably an equal a factor in browser selection by the average end user as features might. Especially where the differences in feature sets has become minuscule.

Your line of reasoning applies to costed product but I don't think it applies in the browser space.

2060: Humvee-sized, bulletproof meat-eating spiders attack

Bad math

Oh pleeeeeze. I know its tongue n cheek but at least make it plausible. There is an upper limit to which those suckers could grow due to mass to strength ratio of the limbs supporting the body. Fact to get to the size of a Humvee and still be able to move the exoskeleton would have to be the reverse of what is suggested. It would have to become as light as possible to maximize the muscle mass to that of the other anatomical structures. The arachnids of the Devonian period got not bigger than 2 meters.

Google OS gOS - if at first you don't succeed...

Missed by a mile

I will grant that the Everex TC2502 was a market flop. But not because it was a bad product. I have two of them -- 1 as a data server, another as the home video server. The hardware and the software was ok for their intended purpose. The blue smock crowd is just too used to Windows.

As to the cloud OS idea. What's wrong with it? This is the OS that should be on a lot of nettops. But gOS, Splashtop and Google need to coordinate. You still need to be able to work on your machine off grid in a Google Gears fashion and update once logged back on. The idea is sound.

Fact the concept is so sound that IBM/Canonical/Virtual Bridge are selling this same idea to corporations.