Posts by Alistair

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

System lock-in, subscriptions and where does Wall Street Take This in the future.

Currently, all of our commercially developed software and operating systems are being turned into *Cloud Based* *Subscription* services, based on the wall street rule #1 of subscribers being more valuable than sales. This issue is why we're seeing the apple cloud/windows storage first solution in current end user desktop or laptop installs.

This is effectively locking users into subscription models. At least the vast majority of users, who are not sufficiently knowledgeable to disconnect from said services. I'm personally quite convinced that this subscription model is only the beginning. I recall (vaguely) in the mid 80's a couple ( I think three or four actually, but not certain) movies being made in Hollywood with some highly specialized post processing work, done by a specific company, where that company ended up suing one or more studios after the fact with the "You used our IP to create *your* IP so you owe us part of your profit" gambit. As I recall the overall result was spectacularly bad for that company, *but* the initial legal result was that they had a leg to stand on, it was just poorly argued.

Adobe took a similar run at things in the late 90's or early 00's but lost overall. Considering the state of the US judicial system at this moment, and where it could head in the near future, I'd be pretty damn careful about

a) where I was storing my work, no matter *WHAT* that work was

b) what tools I used to create said work

c) what systems I left said work on, unprotected.

I can honestly see that there is a ledge where say, MS, owning a subscription based code storage base, and providing subscription based *"AI"* assistance to coders on said code storage base, decides that the next big thing in say, game design and graphics was built

a) on their code storage base

b) using their *"AI"* code creation tool

c) used their intellectual property directly

and is therefore *THEIR CODE NOT YOURS*

Hey, they will have the actual numbers. How many lines users actually wrote, how many lines the *"AI"* wrote, how many compiles were manual, how many compiles were run but the *"AI"*

Good luck out there folks.

*" : Plesase note that the advertised tool(s) covered by this term are in no way shape or form intelligent. They are statistical analysis tools trained on enormous amounts of general garbage.

Headset hype meets harsh reality as Apple and Meta VR shipments fizzle in 2025

Re: Smart?

They'd be selling 24x7 advertising access that you cannot look away from, and you'd have zero recourse because you signed terms and conditions "that we may change at any time."

I think there was a black mirror episode on this? Or perhaps a movie?

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Re: NTP

I've been in systems and networking since 1988 and I can't remember this happening.

I'm in much the same boat.

I've done the "enterprise NTP pool systems" thing. Since we fed a certain Cellular network as well as the systems supporting that,

1) 3 groups of 5 servers - Set as peer 2 and cross referencing

2) 4 upstream peer 0 *pools*, plus two GPS sources for drift alignment

3) within the DC, we *still* had localized battery backups for *at least* 3 of the 5 units in each DC, over and above all of the DC power backups.

4) and most importantly only 6 people in the org(s) ever had any access to the damn things, just because they were so damn important.

Trump Media jumps aboard the speculative nuclear fusion bandwagon

Follow the ...... <money>/<fusion>/<energy>

Fusion is something that has seen a *lot* of research and technical progress in the last dozen years, and, *if* that progress continues it will provide substantial technical and financial benefit to the whole of the planet, but as to *when* that occurs I'm not about to even attempt to predict. I've seen notes that *several* research groups around the globe have managed to get tokamak based fusion reactors out to about 45 or 55 seconds of operation, and a *suggestion* that one of those runs had been energy *neutral*, although I think the sums involved we kinda fuzzy on just how much of the startup energy they managed to recover. None, however were sufficiently stable to suggest that we're ready to start thinking about building generating capacity.

Trump on the other hand has been abundantly clear since his *first* term in office that his sole objective in becoming and being president is to make himself and his immediate associates as wealthy as is possible. Period. His handouts to the broligarchy were pure and simple payoffs for investing in getting him elected. I get the idea that he was utterly jealous of the broligarchy, and as a result he doesn't really like them even now.

Thus, Trump Media geting in bed with TAE smells just a wee bit odd. Although I've seen a reference that when TAE initially formed, there was a russian oligarch connected to it, but I've not seen anything to back that reference, if there is substantiation of that I might want to pursue just where that avenue leads before making any assumptions about what this is *really* about.

What stinks to high heaven on this front is the murder of a reasonably well known fusion specialist in academia just a few days before hand. I'm no raging conspiracy nut, but this has the aroma of a skunk on the side of the road on a hot august night.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Lost for words

I've configured environment TMP directory pointers on SO MANY MF@#$%@#$% third party "enterprise" apps in my career I have considered just filing security bugs on the vendors anonymously. Wether or NOT the data is confidential or not, it is a habit any *nix admin should engage. <And in many cases one needs to actually create a tmp folder for the app, in its own disk space>

AI benchmarks are a bad joke – and LLM makers are the ones laughing

Re: Turtle

I'm sure that the AI cohort will all be suffering from tears in the rain soon.

Without, of course, having seen things off the shoulder of Orion.

Meta can't afford its $600B love letter to Trump

There will be fallout.

The commitments being made by the tech billionaires to the Trump Regime are, in toto, unattainable. Between the AI 3 card monte game, Larry (et fils), Zilcherberg, there have been about $2.2T US committed to various bullshit enterprises. Furthermore, in the various Celebrity Presidential Parades about the planet, there are bout $4.4T to $6.8T US commitments to purchase *energy* (variously, crude, refined petroleum, LNG etc) over the next 5 years.

Taken individually any of these commitments is possible, but collectively they result in the US having 0 barrels of oil, 0 CM of natural gas and almost 0 electrical capacity for the people living, working and quite likely dying in the US.

The US economy is in free fall, and is likely already in a recession, to wit, the Fed actually DID lower the prime (admittedly only a quarter point) while there is very clearly more being spent (several TIMES more) by the entirety of the US than is coming in from the collective incomes of business, government, individuals and the financial groups.

Thus this "We will build it and they will come" bullshit is precisely bullshit.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Re: Dammit Gelsinger!

on what evidence do you plan B choosers suppose everyone in Hell, presuming it really exists, won't be eternally in total isolation from the rest of the population (each in his own galaxy, so to speak)?

Oh dear lord, please do not tempt me further

SIM city: Feds say 100,000-card farms could have killed cell towers in NYC

eerrrrmmmm

The power plug by the AC unit looks more europe than 'murrica to me. Mind you its not a GREAT photo, so i might be seeing blur more than round ports

Think tank warns China's polysilicon subsidies are frying Western fabs

Re: Interesting numbers

USA's car market has been somewhat protectionistic since they noticed the Japanese were a threat.

Uhmm, no. Since the *very* beginning. And you think the auto industrialists were protectionistic? Ever heard of a company named Avro?

Red Hat back-office team to be Big and Blue whether they like it or not

Redhat sadly lost the option to choose the culture.

Footnote: I was hired at RH in October 2018. Less than a month later the purchase offer was dropped.

The chant from both teams on the purchase was that RH would continue as it was and IBM would have no influence.

It took less than 8 months before the pivot. Jim Whitehurst was appointed President of IBM. And less than 5 months later resigned. I have no need to ask Jim. It was abundantly clear by that point that IBM culture, empolyee policy, management technique was being leveraged on the Redhat structure. I KNOW why he left, leaving behind some very healthy bonuses and such. Very Very Very sad set of circumstances for anyone working at Redhat.

Thus this article was in no way shape or form *news*. It was expected.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: Banyan VINES

Dear gussie, there are still a couple others about that remember Banyan. And the nightmare of haivng an idiot in a foreign branch set time and date in their LOCAL time format on the prompt.......

CA/US/PI/IN/SA/TK/UK, I think we got hit at LEAST once a month.

Trump made Intel an offer it couldn't refuse

Thats Soooooo Republican

*cough*

Yes, the government should be invested in the corporations .......... said not one single republican ever.

Considering rather a large number of long term investment organisations have ben leaning down their Intel investments of late it seems a very trumpian decision.

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

I've been on the LKML since the year dot, and I do not remember anyone griping that they were only there because their Boss forced them into it.

Again proof of selective memory issues on certain issues.

NetBSD 11 prepares for launch with 57 supported platforms

Contemplates a crazy thought

I know where there is a 3 pack of Itanium Superdomes that just recently got turned off and replaced with other hardware. Im wondering how many vms I could pack on *those* critters.

IT firing spree: Shrinking job market looks even worse after BLS revisions

Looks like I got out of the Big IT and Fintech and into Defense just in time!

Immigration and Customs Enforcement only THINK they are a defence service. I'd suggest resigning from there ASAP

Re: +1 for the tears reference!

@chivo243

I'm not having many good months lately either, I've seen *entire* IT depts dropped, replaced with newbies and "*AI*" support tools. Mostly in what would typically be referred to as "Small/Medium" enterprise operations. (600 -> 2k employees, perhaps 70 or so as IT) where it was "Move it all to the clod, and we don't need IT no more" actions. For at least one of those, I know the Senior Director responsible, and that person has a resignation letter sitting undated on their desk.

Sadly telling the id10T execusuite that AI does not yet exist and that LLMs *WILL* go off the rails if not carefully ringfenced and maintained gets you a pink slip instantly. Until the LLM does indeed go off the rails and costs the id10T execusuite their collective bonuses at the worst possible moment.

*no, its NOT a typo, I call it clod, not cloud

Gadget geeks aghast at guru's geriatric GPU

Re: Kernel 6.16 and ancient AMD processors

@AlanJ

There are gcc specific options to deal with those issues these days, I've had to optimize builds on Bulldozer for ages.

Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of the Jello shot

I'll be dragging 'em all back out

It is somewhat ironic just how much of what he wrote, sang, and recorded back in the late 50's and 60's is yet once more, completely relevant to the events of the day.

Honestly one of the most direct attacks on the "American Empire" back then, and considering the Id10T in charge at the moment, absolutely appropriate music and diatribes

Of course the maga crowd will be horribly offended and call him a libtard or something, but trust me, he gets to own them.

Struggling to sell EVs, Tesla pivots to slinging burgers

Dear god

Anyone else here reading Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock? Getting a jarring feeling from this?

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

Re: Logs

Not so long ago in our perspective, but back in ancient history to some, there was a third party vendor agency for a certain yacht laden database and application platform vendor that was assisting in the build out of our implementation of an application platform. Sadly the architect advisor they had demonstrated at their first presentation the level at which this vendor was operating, by insisting that each table in the underlying DB had to have a dedicated spindle in the storage array. When asked if they knew how many tables were in the planned DB they replied "I believe perhaps 50 or 60".

The DB involved had just over 52,000 tablespaces, and was projected to add approximately 1200 a year. (Hey, I was platform NOT DBA). The consult went downhill from there. And it was a LOOONNNG way down. Anyone know about HPUX filesystem i-node issues these days?

In any case, no, in EVERY case LVM is your friend

Foundry competition heats up as Japan’s Rapidus says 2nm chip tech on track for 2027

Re: What is that picture?

@ david12

That URL is long enough that I wont click on it just because I would expect to get rickrolled.

Hegseth signs flying memo to expand military use of cheap drones in oddball video

Re: You'd think if he's going to be a posing twat he could at least do it properly.

I was hoping the drone would explode.

Personally I was kinda expecting the drone carrying the note to take the hit when he snatched the note and trim a good inch or so off the TV News Reporter Hair Glue glom on the top of his head. If that thing is a head and not a brick

Red Hat sweetens the RHEL deal for biz devs – just don't put it in prod

Re: "Neither freebie version includes access to the Red Hat Satellite fleet-management tool."

I never did SAT because we had issue with the way system config and details were stored *at redhats end*.

Cloned the repos we had access to and kept our own copies. Used several different FOSS utilities to keep the systems updated and since we never stored app/user data on the same volumes as the OS we did (reinstall) on version jumps. Release updates and security patch runs were in general painless. I learned entirely too much about anaconda.

Former reality TV star appointed NASA interim administrator

Considering Duffy's background, experience, and performance to date:

I am utterly heartboken. Nasa, throughout my life has been able to provide an awesome perspective on the universe, and how humanity can, at least once in a blue moon, get shit together, and work with *something* approaching global cooperation. Duffy is utterly useless to start with and appears to be nothing more than a an echo mouth for dumb donnie's daily drivel dumps. I hope the middle managers at NASA are prepared to keep him gagged, blindfolded, handcuffed and hidden in the filing cabinet in the locked bathroom in the unlit basement behind the leopard warning sign until they get things done without his useless input.

Tim Cook's Tim Cook stepping down from Apple

Re: more departures

Is there something in the air in California at the moment?

Yes, there is, the faint aroma of impending fascism

Double-detonation supernova could explain why the universe is full of candles

Re: oddly

I'm feeling like there's something integral missing here.

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Re: Land of the Free - to be shot

I'm going to be honest, as far as MY experience goes, other than USA and certain parts of Mexico, the Officers of the Law that are armed *typically* have to file paperwork with the authorities when they so much as *draw* a firearm, and paperwork is anathema to the vast majority of cops. I know at least 5 here in Canuckistan, covering 3 different forces.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter learns new trick at the age of 19: ‘very large rolls’

American attitudes of late

Can best be demonstrated by HHS, where science is being banned and social media wasteland resources are fed to AI to generate "Scientific" papers (tm). Sadly NASA may want to move its head office to Winterpeg, where it might find a few more folks willing to listen to real facts, instead of horseshit.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

To bring the gen alphas in

Where are the magic chicken?

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

Re: Always get downvoted

Gnisho:

From the flow I'm guessing the AC has no clue of what he speaks.

Re: Always get downvoted

I'll point out that SSH is secure. And my X sessions always tunnel. In all honesty, over 25 plus years of using various unices in an enterprise environment, I've *NEVER* had an unprotected X session configured. Localhost ONLY. Tunnelled back to the desktop in SSH. I built *all* our systems that sported X that way. And in coherent discussions with real systems admins all over the world it is generally the default configuration for most Unixes.

Unless you're talking air gap requirements, configured correctly Xorg server can be made secure, I've not tried similar with wayland as I've never used it.

ESA's XMM-Newton finds huge filament of missing matter

Intergalactic filaments of energy

astronomers have found an enormous filament of hot gas that bridges four galaxy clusters. ...

As well as containing approximately ten times the mass of the Milky Way and stretching for 23 million light-years (equivalent to traversing the Milky Way end to end around 230 times), the filament clocks at over ten million degrees.

Hmmm. Superhighway perhaps?

I mean, have ANY of you been on the 401 eastbound around Avenue Rd at 4:00pm on a weekday?

Long, searing hot, any time of year, and radiating *some* sort of violent energy in every direction.

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

I'm starting to wonder

Gwen has done spectacular things with SpaceX, getting most of it working rather well overall, I'm wondering when she'll get one of the *smart* managers to take over Starship development work from whichever idiot is listening to Elon.

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

Re: Problems

Having managed a fleet of around 4500 linux systems (VMs, Standalone HW, Clusters, gateways, dev/test/qa/prod, infrastructure storage etc) Umm, guess what mah frien? There be most excellent OPEN SOURCE solutions for fleet management that make that disaster from redmond look like utter crap.

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

@ Doctor

back when GSM was introduced, and with it the IMEI, we were briefed that the network operators could at least block

Having been around a certain mobile telecom operator, yes, indeed. There was an agreed protocol to distribute *known and verified* stolen device IMEIs as a list amongst (at the time I was tasked with redeploying the infra) at *least* 11 different north american operators. (I say at least, however I suspected from the size of some of these reports that a couple of the operator sources were collating lists from elsewhere). These data exchanges were weekly between US/CAN operators and daily between CAN/CAN operators.

The single largest issue with GENERATING the data was obtaining correctly defined reports that the devices were actually stolen. In our case we needed the actual report to come from an end user and include either a corporate entity label, or a police report #. (i.e. the device was owned by a corporate and the corp was reporting it stolen through appropriate contacts, or owned by an individual and included a police report #) You can see the issue there. The reporting requirements were to prevent someone locking out someone else's phone with a malicious report.

Sometime after 2008 or 2009, the police report requirement was dropped at our end, but there were some events that came close to being large legal issues with stolen phone reports. I'm not aware of the *current* processes, but having seen the data reporting requirements about 5 years ago, I'm guessing that getting an IMEI blocked is going to be somewhat harder these days.

Feds gut host behind pig butchering scams that bilked $200M from Americans

Re: Subeditor went to town... Smithfield?

Feds gut host behind pig butchering scam

Offal all over the shop."

Dammit someone spilled the Stewie again.

Anthropic CEO frets about 20% unemployment from AI, but economists are doubtful

FSD cars can be trusted...there are numerous videos of it being demonstrated on Youtube on real roads, in real traffic etc etc. The only thing that makes FSD dangerous is the humans on the road doing dumb unpredictable shit, like opening their door into traffic, not following the rules, randomly changing lanes, jack knifing trucks etc.

FSD is not now and will likely not for quite some time be "trusted", not because it cannot handle day to day normal events, but rather because it cannot handle humans on the road doing dumb unpredictable shit. That, sir, is the POINT, humans do dumb unpredictable shit.

Re: Career Ending Oracle

Oral transmission? Is that what allows Darling Donnie to shift gears so often?

Meta – yep, Facebook Meta – is now a defense contractor

XR devices for the military

to *cough* "Enhance Warfighter's abilities"

I think there was a movie once where the military had such a device, but it made the quiet kids look like giant evil monsters? Or am I just a screaming cynic that sees things I shouldn't?

Palantir's Trump bonanza continues with Fannie Mae contract to fight fraud

Re: Intelligent != Moral

@An_Old_Dog

As Canuck what knows the history, I'm inclined to see that as an insult.

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

@Hubert:

I too find that a bizarre sensation.

AROS turns any PC into an Amiga with USB-bootable distro

Re: Dave

And yet... everything somehow works. Slowly. Painfully. Like dragging a corpse uphill. But it works.

One tweak " "Yeah" Dave *growls*, and smiles ......"

Insufficient upvotes available Sir!

This post deserves an icon change, Have one of these Sir! =====>

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

mouse RSI

I've been using trackballs since..... urrr, well I think I've had mice at offices where I *wasn't* a full timer. I still have my ?? 27 year old (possibly 32?) logitec trackball running, the fingertip, not thumb version, the scrollwheel has had its rubber outer liner replaced many times, oddly with a standard faucet filter washer. I've taken one or another trackball with me to work, I just cannot deal with waving all over the desk.

BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation

Re: So... do you think that everyone who works at Nike is an athlete?

Both of these comments generate unhealty memories, please do not continue this connection.

Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

Re: @Paul Crawford

I didnt want the board flooded with the usual trolls responding

I almost have to up vote for the irony in that line......

CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun

Considering that we're dealing with a lot of other stupid US issues:

I'm thinking that perhaps Mitre should be moved to Canuckistan in May or June. We're gonna have to route around a ton of other idiocy south of our border, might as well fix that issue for the IT world.

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Re: are the chances .... with IT being fundamentally different in novel times of surreal spaces?

@AMAFM

Many of us listened even *before* the launch, however the launches appear to have fascinated about 29% of the US voting population back in 2016, and it has carried through to the now rather destructive landing craters, including the disaster of global markets lately. Hopefully the fascination breaks before the critters get out of the cylinders.

EU lands 25% counter tariff punch on US, Trump pauses broad import levy hike – China excepted

Re: Trump vs the EU

@VOT - you really need to give up. Most of the folks on this forum are quite well experienced in the REAL world, not your fantasies.

Canada still provides 48 to 60 percent of the base crude oil that the US consumes. Aaaaaaaaand Trump has slapped that crude with a 10% tariff.

Trump is NOT a shark. He's far more like a mudskipper.

Trump has a substantial track record of bankruptcy, lost fraud lawsuits against his businesses, and several cases of having his very own words used against him in courts of law. He's the bully on the schoolyard, facing not one, but in the end 11 countries (Europe, South America, Canada) lead by folks who have amongst them, 7 Phd's and at least 14 Masters degrees. I'm not even counting China, where Xi has a rather long list of core governmental agencies lead by exceptionally smart folks.

Re: "Canada will become a US state"

@AC

Carney will be even worse than Trudeau. Your economy has tanked and Carney will likely finish it off.

Basically considering the last 9 years, including COVID and the idiot in the WH down south for the *second* time, Canada has done just fine overall. Compared to the rest of the G20 we're in pretty damn good shape. Lower inflation overall, lower debt increases vs GDP drop, lower individual non-capital debt than the rest of the G20. You need to stop listening to the bullshit Pollievre and the rest of the corporatists have been spouting in the social media assault on democracy.

Bluntly, Pollievre has been a lifelong politician, and has NOTHING in the way of accomplishments, nor for that matter does Trump, who has a staggeringly long list of failures. Much like our compatriots in Mexico, we Canadians are deciding that someone with a goddamn BRAIN will do us so much better than someone who can only spout useless cliches about things being broken.

Germany has had the great good fortune to have had a Really Smart Leader for a number of years, unfortunately, Angela has stepped out of leadership. I seriously hope that the UK can find someone as well educated as Macron and Merkel and Carney.