* Posts by gerryg

767 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2009

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Electoral Commission had internet-facing server with unpatched vuln

gerryg

Don't blame Microsoft

They are just selling what they have always sold. The real problem is the over promoted tossers trapped in the headlights vaguely recalling that "no-one ever got sacked for buying IBM" and making a false read across.

There is no doubt that a Linux based is less convenient but as Obama said about something else, that's the point.

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

gerryg

Ceramic cartridges only

I don't recall if the Garrard SP25 was ever available with a ceramic cartridges (and flippable styii) but the upmarket 86 and 100 ("SB"?) were only MC/MM. However the distortion from a ceramic cartridge was around 10% IIRC somewhat limiting other benefits.

gerryg

Re: Had to have been filed 2021-04-01?

The RIAA playback curve has got nothing to do with "distortion intrinsic in the mechanical pickup" but is an attempt to flatten the RIAA encoding curve without which the bass would require more room (wider grooves) so reducing playback time.

While I broadly agree with your view of CDs versus mechanical recoding and rejoice at the ability to listen to Electric Ladyland in its entirety without a stacking mechanism and the LPs being sides 1-4 and 2-3, I do occasionally muse whether the loss of ritual and artifact associated with a 12" disc has contributed to the demise in the perceived value of "the album".

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

gerryg

Re: AI training must be stopped from scraping Twitter - pretty please?

Unfortunately the OED now equates "literally" to "actually" undermining https://xkcd.com/725/

Mars helicopter phones home after 63 days of silence

gerryg

obligatory

xkcd

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

gerryg

Re: If RH can't do this...

https://www.suse.com/c/navigating-changes-in-the-open-source-landscape/

You might find this interesting

gerryg

You can get the source code for SEL

https://www.suse.com/download/sles/

Free support for 60 days

https://www.suse.com/source-code/

Typically, the source code is distributed along with the binaries. You can also send us a written request to provide the source code for a SUSE product by addressing your written request to:

SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH

c/o IP & Privacy Counsel

Maxfeldstrasse 5 , 90409

Nuremberg, Germany

Five Eyes and Microsoft accuse China of attacking US infrastructure again

gerryg

Re: Meanwhile

https://fsfe.org/news/2023/news-20230323-01.en.html

gerryg

Meanwhile

The EU is making it harder/potentially illegal to deploy Linux based systems, perhaps that is also a "living off the land" exploit?

Red Hat releases RHEL 9.2 to customers, with buffet of rebuilds for the rest of us

gerryg

At risk of...

...the SUSE Linux Enterprise version has always been downloadable without any argybargy. The idea that a version of Linux is downloadable "free to existing customers" has always struck me as being a bit odd.

Similarly regarding the general absence of comments about such practice.

Another cloud provider runs to shelter from Microsoft's licensing practices

gerryg

Re: Good

Or insist on truly open standards and let the market operate by preventing lock-in.

Central UK govt awards £12M+ contract to leave Google Workspace for Microsoft 365

gerryg

Re: Why did it split into two in the first place? Answer enclosed

That is a restatement of the problem not a solution.

Last time I checked the Internet is pretty big and no-one needs a specific piece of equipment.

Once people promoted beyond their level of competence started choosing walled gardens for solutions it's only a matter of time before the wall become a problem.

gerryg

Leading from behind

Given that the solution was never going to focus on interoperability and open standards it's just further evidence that the national centre for cyber security advises the use of chocolate teapots.

If the only way central government can play buzzword bingo with words such as integration, efficiency, cross-departmental collaboration, synergy is by using software from the same organisation (and it really doesn't matter which one) then someone somewhere is missing the point.

Why does the bingo card never include: lock-in, resilience, independence, innovation (let alone reliability or security)?

Fujitsu bags £142M UK government work since Horizon probe announced

gerryg

Re: "We can't undo the damage that has been done."

The government seems to have created a new compensation scheme, recognising the shortcomings of the original scheme

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-compensation-scheme-opens-for-postmasters-who-exposed-horizon-scandal

gerryg

Re: Shares anyone?

While I'm sure the "right" answer is important to you these contract are awarded by civil servants and the Post Office is a private company.

I doubt it is possible to for a government to ban Fujitsu but without a doubt the real difficulty is that once any organisation fails to (a) consider the importance of interoperability and (b) fail to ask the question "and how do I get rid of you lot?" (to reframe Tony Benn's quote about democratic processes) the only way forward is carry ob with who you have got or a clone. The case study of d'addario strings' decison to rip out (in this case) Microsoft and go FOSS is as rare as it is instructive. They were stung by a licensing audit for software they were not even using and wanted at any cost to be rid of the shackle.

Horizon, as Private Eye reported for many years, was shameful. Failure to consider (a) and (b) above makes the disruption caused by ripping it out inconceivable. That's the real cost of these projects. It's true of all these deeply embedded outsourcers, especially once they have sold in their various secret sauces.

You should direct your ire and vitriol towards those at the operational level who took the decisions back in the day, after suitable technical visits to nice parts of the world provided by any of the usual suspects and other soft (or less soft) corruption.

It's time to stop fearing CPU power management

gerryg

Is computing wasteful?

In large scale manufacturing there is or used to be a cost engineering department. Back in the days of discrete components can we use cheaper 10% tolerance resistors, are we paying too much for plastic ties, can this product be re-engineered and so on. Doesn't seem yet to.apply to data processing.

Will data centre operations ever reach the stage of people questioning whether they need a Porsche to nip out to buy the groceries?

Just musing as I read articles suggesting that computing is consuming 110% of the world's electricity consumption and comments on other articles here decrying re-using data centre heat generation to heat swimming pools.

Tupperware looking less airtight than you'd think

gerryg

That's put the lid on things

I set such store in Tupperware

Microsoft ditches plans for 500,000 sq ft London office

gerryg

Re: Enfield

Also, to be fair, London is the capital of the United Kingdom

Microsoft Defender shoots down legit URLs as malicious

gerryg

They all do it

Defender seems to be no different from the other options. Periodically we have to re-white list our website in order to avoid triggering warnings.

I've forgotten which one as it hasn't happened for a few months but trust me if it were possible to have an undiluted rant at Microsoft I wouldn't miss the opportunity.

Germany sours on Microsoft again, launches antitrust review

gerryg

Interoperability

Interoperability and genuine open standards. Perhaps unbundling too.

If for example governments were to notice that Microsoft uses transitional rather than strict ISO 29500 despite all the rhetoric at the time and so insist on ISO 26300, a genuine open standard then over time it would cause something to change.

It's cheaper and more effective to enable interoperability and as a consequence prevent lock-in and enable choice.

Anti trust takes years and achieves nothing fundamental, it does provide a living for lawyers and economists.

Oh, Snap. openSUSE downloads increasing, and Leap 15.5 is coming soon

gerryg

Unfortunately

I might be coming across as a fanboi, but what looks a bit Windows 98?

I've always supposed SLE only has GNOME as it offers the user fewest options on the desktop, but that looks nothing like 98.

I have been using what is now Tumbleweed for 25 years now, and KDE can look fairly much however you want, including a right to left desktop for lefties (unfortunately not every application is lefthand aware, so it's not as useful as it could be).

I use YaST about once every six months and don't care what it looks like.

gerryg

Re: The heck it does!

Out of curiousity can you provide examples of things it doesn't do and config files it overwrites?

I haven't not used YaST for years but I do recall warnings in some config files not to update manually as YaST will overwrite them.

RIP Gordon Moore: Intel co-founder dies, aged 94

gerryg

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

In early 1990 a laptop computer with a VGA monochrome LCD screen, running whatever at a few MHz with around 1Mb RAM and a tiddy HD cost £2,500.

Red Hat veteran will head up SUSE from May as Di Donato steps down

gerryg

Chameleon?

Red changing to Green?

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

gerryg

£1250? Why?

I suppose the 24-36 hours battery life might be useful but both my laptops must be around 8-10 years old, one's a second hand show pony but still more than adequate, the other, the workhorse, is a second hand X230 updated with an SSD, bought with a surprisingly good condition battery for about £150 with none of the limitations regarding USB (A), monitor, Ethernet. Both are on full fat Tumbleweed and are doing fine.

I suppose I need people to want to own these things so they sell their old stuff to bottom feeders like me but I do find myself wondering if these devices go alongside a £3,500 carbon framed push-bike and £15,000 turntable.

UK.gov bans TikTok from its devices as a 'precaution' over spying fears

gerryg

Re: 冰山一角

Part of a large crowd. I had a conversation with a journalist recently and she opined that she found the idea of AI rather worrying. As I said to her, she was possibly justified but what about all the other stuff which she should be worried about.

Cloud upstart offers free heat if you host its edge servers

gerryg

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

Even if the system only works part of the year it seems as if energy usage will be reduced. Not sure what your point was.

At least one crematorium has used a similar system for about a decade

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-23104502.amp

IDC gets even more pessimistic about PC sales

gerryg

Re: I, for one...

https://linux-hardware.org/

https://bsd-hardware.info/

gerryg

Re: Innovation

I'm curious to know what "next level" actually means in practice.

I have an ASUS laptop which must be getting on for 10 years old, it is fanless with an Intel something or other running at 900Mhz, 8GB RAM, It does have seriously good I/O and was probably one of the first to use an SSD. It's in a nice slim line aluminium case, so slim, the Ethernet port is via a USB plug-in. Its screen is something like 5200xforgotten.

When I got it I hoofed out the 128GB SSD complete with Windows something and put in a 256GB SSD then shoved openSUSE on it. The high resolution screen was a PITA but over time KDE has got there.

No, I don't do video processing nor finite element analysis with it, but for general use it is still snappy. Battery life remains at around 7 hours (though I use it on mains when possible)

It looks the DBs and when the screen eventually dies unless I can find a cheap pin compatible lower resolution screen (IMHO no-one needs 5200xforgotten on a 13" laptop) the laptop will die as replacement high resolution screens remain bonkers expensive.

gerryg

Tedious, I know but...

...if Apple on a new PC why not Linux on your current hardware?

There's a learning curve for both and I don't think anyone that has actually used any of the Linux DEs would claim they are awkward.

Windows 11 update breaks PCs that dare sport a custom UI

gerryg

Is this news?

Is there anything in this article that takes anyone by surprise?

What I don't understand is why people expect these third party modifications to survive in an environment in which someone else wants to define the look and feel (along with everything else).

While (using Microsoft = true) Do

Someone here has already suggested that it is (only now?) time to look for an alternative.

Someone else will bang on about their enterprise install and how it's just not that easy even if they wanted to.

A third will chirp on about so many Linux distros and fragmentation.

Do End

US cybersecurity chief: Software makers shouldn't lawyer their way out of security responsibilities

gerryg

Re: fine words butter no parnips

You could choose not to use it. Would you put your valuables in a safe that didn't close properly? Since when has crossing your fingers and hoping been a strategy?

gerryg

fine words butter no parnips

I remember a million years ago reading a book called "Pascal programming with style".

The foreword contained a rhetorical request to express a preference for a programme that was correct first time or one that had been fixed 100 times and was known to be correct.

It has always been acceptable for a closed source, software-for-money business model to ship the product and wait for the bug reports then decide which ones were going to be addressed. This isn't so far away from the story that Sinclair shipped Spectrum computers they knew to be faulty and then reshipped the returns to new customers except that somehow that was seen to be unacceptable.

I have sat through close to twenty-five years of using (now) openSUSE and not being given features because they didn't yet exist, didn't work properly or because to implement them meant a security risk (e.g., CD-ROM drives in user space back in 2002). It was always about security.

On;y this evening I was reading a discussions about improvements to ext4 and what they meant for filesystem security. I've avoided the intense discussions about xxxBSD versus Linux kernels because I don't understand but happy in the knowledge that somebody cares.

Where, anywhere, in the closed source world are these painful (in every sense of the word) discussions taking place? Who care that one arm of government is bleating about what other arms of government have allowed to happen?

I remember and took part in the intense warfare over UK government policy proposals on using open standards and the amount of resource poured in by close source companies trying to resist.

The solution has always been to insist on open standards and interoperability and let software do what software does best. Somehow policy makers have never quite delivered

Zoom: The sound of web chat biz's annual profits nosediving

gerryg

Randomly

This reminds me of a small company making omelette pans. Following a recommendation by Delia Smith they had to decide to forego the opportunity of a ramp in demand or expand production. Having chose the latter route once the Waitrose caravanserai moved on, they had an unsupportable cost base and they went out of business.

I thought that Zoom responded admirably to COVID but now have the curse of too much capacity. In so far as they care, I hope they survive

Who writes Linux and open source software?

gerryg

Re: Never Forgive, Never Forget

Harshly expressed but let's focus on interoperability and proper standards then the sentiment might be better understood

Humans strike back at Go-playing AI systems

gerryg

Re: I'll have to ponder that...

I don't know if you are a Go player but I'll bite.

Alpha Go was trained by running through a zillion (possibly one or two fewer) professional games, I assume to try to abstract knowledge. It what we all do (with a few orders of magnitude adjustment), looking for insight.

Alpha Zero, using the garnered systems development experience, in a constrained environment that only has three rules...:

Alternate play

Stones remain on the border unless captured

You can't play so as to repeat the previous position (the formal explanation of ko)

(Chinese scoring or AGA (US) modified Japanese rules remove an infinitesimal lacuna)

...taught itself by playing against itself a gazillion times and was generally considered to be stronger than Alpha Go

KataGo uses Alpha Zero but with crowd sourced weightings to overcome the lack of expertise.

Does that help?

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

gerryg

Re: Serious question

Berkshire Hathaway bet on this manufacturer beings better than that one. See discussion of EV in article.

Manufactures compete to attract capital. Investors are betting their own money and they have to be careful nor to run out of it. . It's not perfect but it keeps things leaner and meaner than they would be otherwise.

In the above example consider what happens when governments get involved, e.g., the Mini. Every time one was sold it increased the losses on the project.

Microsoft's .NET Framework gets one less update reboot

gerryg

Linux user here.

Since 1997. Most definitely not a Microsoft fanboi,

However some updates do need a reboot to take effect, most obviously the kernel. However I can choose when to reboot (or indeed, to update), which I surmise is what you really meant.

Oracle NetSuite datacenter plunges offline for a day, customers warned of data loss

gerryg

Captain Scarlet reference

Embarrassment, "big red"...

Or was it the mysterons wot did it?

Spotted in the wild: Chimera – a Linux that isn't GNU/Linux

gerryg

Sound and fury

I know some corporates, e.g., Google, will not allow GPLv3 inside their code. Difficult to speculate why, perhaps it creates a hardware creep akin to Balmer's description of Linux, which seems to suggest GPLv3 does what it says on the tin and if there's no need to pick up the tin then don't.

Chimera is a pre-alpha by one person (see the appropriate XKCD) It might or might not be interesting, I've got no idea. Good luck to him scratching his itch.

I suppose the number of people involved will multiply based on the number of comments on this thread.

Perhaps one way to discover if any of this really matters is when Chimera gets to an RC and there are several developers.

Microsoft swears it's not coming for your data with scan for old Office versions

gerryg

Re: If you don't like it...

The long run consists of a series of short runs.

If it is ruinously expensive in the current short run you have been asleep during all the other ruinously expensive shorts runs. If you have been self-harming for a long time there is no help I can offer you

gerryg

If you don't like it...

..do something about it.

If you don't want to do something about it (beyond moaning about what bastards Microsoft are) you are not that upset, stop posturing.

WINE Windows translation layer has matured like a fine... you get the picture

gerryg

WINE helped me kick the habit

I had been using WINE to run a simple Windows based video editor. Unfortunately after 7.0 the application went from limping along but usable to DOA.

This forced me to bit the bullet and learn how to use kdenlive. It wasn't obvious but needs must.

Thanks to WINE I am now tee total and kdenlive turns out to be really neat

British government torched over lack of chips strategy

gerryg

Perhaps once burned?

How long would it take us to catch up with decent fab? Design appears to be an indigenous skill, albeit championed only by ARM.

Just getting to 5nm is a bit more difficult than getting to 8um and see how we go from there.

We can see attempts in Russia and China which get A* for effort but C- for usefulness. The government tried with Inmos (anyone remember them?) and the Transputer (remember that?). They tried to bully GEC (before it merged and dispersed) We got quite good at III-V or even II-VI (remember those?)

I don't know what the answer is, but reports are easy. I suppose I like to think we are part of the western world which engages in trade conducted within parameters which include the rule of law.

At the turn of the year Macron "addressed the nation" with plans that included reining in Google et al. Not many people seem to like them but spending money on producing also rans doesn't seem to be a great decision.

Qualcomm feels the squeeze because you don't want a new smartphone right now

gerryg

churn, much?

"worldwide smartphone sales fell 18.3 percent in Q4 to 300.3 million, and were down 11.3 percent for the year to 1.2 billion."

That's still one for about every six people on the planet, every year. And, alas, I am part of the problem. Bit shameful really.

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

gerryg

Re: When the EEC was born

In 1957, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg signed a treaty in Rome which established a common market. Enlargement of the original six to nine countries was established by 99 directives passed into UK law by the European Communities Act 1972 establishing the European Economic Community which through further treaties became first the European Community and then the European Union.

Are we OK now?

gerryg

When the EEC was born

It comprised 99 directives.

There were to be 100 but the UK blocked one. It was to prevent pattern parts. If you don't know what a pattern part is, think "this isn't any old radiator hose, this is a reassuringly expensive BMW radiator hose".

I see this measure in exactly the same light. It reserves the market to big players and makes it more difficult for small or new entrants.

It looks like FOSS might be caught in a backwash of a protectionist tendency.

The are large companies that use FOSS to avoid getting locked into monopolistic behaviours. Why else did IBM invest so much money developing the Linux kernel?

Why does the Open Innovation Network exist?

I have no idea how this will pan out but if you think e.g., the diesel emissions scandal was a trifling misstep then you see the natural functioning of the now EU in a different way to me.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

gerryg

If you owe the bank...

...£10,000 you have got a problem. If you owe the bank £10,000,000 the bank has got a problem.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

gerryg

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

In days of yore, maps were topological - places were one day's travel on foot apart (minimise threat levels) and a day's travel was a journée corrupted over time to journey.

To throw in a quick French lesson, counter - duration: jour - journée, soir soirée et cetera FWIW

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