Posts by John Sanders

Ha! Win 10 preview for Raspberry Pi 2 pops out of the Microsoft oven

Re: love the hope here.

"""Win10 is probably going to address a lot of your concerns such as increasing use of standards, being free to use (admittedly with the hope of you using their cloud backend)"""

I do not know even how to begin to address this. Either you are very naive or you do not know who MS is.

Why wasn't windows using standards before? Why Windows being free (that remains to be seen) stops what is bad about Windows?

And as for windows on the PI, I said it before this is just an expensive PR exercise.

Paranoid about the NSA? The case for dumping cloud's Big 3

Re: @Vimes

Some of us trust OpenSSH way, way more than any proprietary VPN solution, thank you very much.

OpenSSH is not perfect, but close ;-)

Your new car will dob you in to the cops if you crash, decrees EU

The EU will not let this opportunity go to waste.

As soon as they enable this they will be pushing for GPS tracking and now that there is GPS tracking, there will be new taxes depending where you go.

Here comes big brother a little more.

Top Spanish minister shows citizens are thick as tortillas de ballenas

Re: The Spanish Inquisition

The Moors pillaged Spain for aprox 500 years, the "la convivencia" is an invented leyend from people who haven't read much, people who for example do not know that "The Spanish inquisition" as the killing machine they know it, was a only a mere propaganda image made by the protestants of the time.

And yes, the moors were so "Civilized" as to conquer the Spanish peninsula by the force of their armies, impose the Jizya on all non-muslims, the usual rape of anything female and killing as many Jews as they could.

The majority of the "old culture" and heritage in Spain came from the Romans and the later Wisigoths, the number of monuments and Roman vestiges in Spain is enormous, in its majority civil engineering, roads, bridges, irrigation infrastructure, etc. The Arab heritage is barely a few dozen palaces and their corresponding little bridge.

The majority of the Spanish language is of Latin origin except for a handful of words and the names of a few places.

Famous Spaniards (Spain as such did not exist, Hispania was its name)

Spanish by birth, Marcus Ulpius Trajan was the first Roman Emperor of a non-Italian origin, he became one of the most outstanding emperors of ancient Rome.

I'm afraid that I do not know much about the middle-age Visigoths kingdoms to tell you any names.

Welcome, stranger: Inside Microsoft's command line shell

Powershell

Behaves more like a base scripting language (a summary of the worst of bash, php and perl)

Then you get application extensions to provide extra functionality for the base scripting language to be of any use.

In Unix you have scripting languages and anything that you install/add to the system is already available to anything else that you can call from the shell, or anything that can start a shell, regardless of the language.

Say whatever you want about PowerShell object oriented usage, you will not do much with Exchange objects feeding them to VMWare unless vmware adds support for them, nor you would be able to use those objects on tomorrows latest fart without MS's intervention.

As I said to a Windows colleague once, "Relax; you just have discovered scripting, I was as excited as you when I discovered what you could do with .bat files back in the late 80's"

Who was downloading smut in the office while eating ice cream?

Who cares about porn....?

When I was on-call none of the guys in the rota were supposed to go to the pub, yet we were all drunk pretty much all the time while we were on-call.

Irresponsible? Yes of course, those were more civilized times, before the empire... :-P

Microsoft: Profit DECIMATED because you people aren't buying PCs

Re: Everything they've done since the Ribbon was terrible.

You are forgetting homoeopathy...

Ubuntu 15.04 to bring 'Vivid' updates for cloud, devices this week

VNC

"""The N9 even had VNC builtin - so you could share the phone with your desktop."""

I struggle to understand why Google rather than changing the bloody interface every odd day doesn't spend some time adding something like a VNC server to the stock OS, or someone else for that mater (Are you listening CyanogenMOD?, don't you want a distinctive feature? Give us VNC via ADB/Network)

The unified menu in the Amiga's Workbench

Was hundreds times better implemented and polished than any unified menu on any Linux desktop, and had features still not found today on most desktop environments.

I'm not implying that Linux Desktops are wrong by any means.

Ah the happy Amiga memories.

Spotty dwarf Ceres BARES ALL in NASA's SHINY CLOSEUPS

Re: the good stuff

If only we had another couple of spacecraft orbiting "Uranus" or "Neptune" this would have been the best 20 years ever for space/solar system exploration.

(I was going to write a robot probe on Uranus, but somehow it sounds bad)

Ex-Windows designer: Ballmer was dogmatic, Sinofsky's bonkers, and WinPho needs to change

Yes, yes...

"""But do you know what was a thousand times worse? Going on site, handing someone a Windows Phone,and watching them universally struggle with it…"""

In my village we call that FAIL.

Anyone can come with a GUI that doesn't look like anything else, but what's the F***** point if it will just confuse people. Change for the sake of being different is only good if it is way better than what we had before.

Sysadmins, patch now: HTTP 'pings of death' are spewing across web to kill Windows servers

Raise your hand...

All those who think that is a good idea, to make a driver receive HTTP data from the network into kernel space...

At the end of the auditorium all Microsoft engineers raise their hands and it can be heard chatting animatedly: "yeah! with this we will teach how to make things fast to those unix types"

(That was a while ago, in a MS conference I think it was the one for Windows 2008)

Regardless... Obviously this is not a problem, hardly anyone in the press will talk much about it, if it was Apache crashing Linux we'll be hearing for months to come, MS will pitch it in their marketing crap, and it will have a funny name like "Dead Web Server Pass".

Operation Redstone: Microsoft preps double Windows update in 2016

Re: Subscription model?

""" All you need is to be able to trust Microsoft. """

Big HA!

Torvalds' temptress comes of age: Xfce 4.12 hits the streets

Troll cut the FUD

Please easy with the systemd FUD, you could lose some fingers there...

Google takes ARC Welder to Android, grafts on Windows, OS X

Re: When in Rome...

There are APIs with dummy data for testing purposes me thinks...

Locally Integrated Menus back on Vivid Vervet’s menu

I can not wait

A) For people making posts about how terrible systemd is because a detail that only affects them is buggy and systemd is the worse thing ever.

B) The majority of the people who criticised systemd without having even seen it realizing that systemd is not only not going to eat their babies, but also it is quite a few steps forward.

How do you check your logs on a systemd system:

less /var/log/<whatever>

How do you mount stuff:

vim /etc/fstab

How do you... you get it,

Starting and stopping things is perhaps the biggest change for most people, instead of:

/etc/init.d/<service> restart

you do:

systemctl restart <service>

Some of the things systemd does are a dramatic improvement over sysv, like tracking processes IE:

systemctl status firewalld

firewalld.service - firewalld - dynamic firewall daemon

Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/firewalld.service; enabled)

Active: active (running) since Wed 2015-04-01 14:15:22 BST; 7s ago

Main PID: 3463 (firewalld)

CGroup: /system.slice/firewalld.service

+-3463 /usr/bin/python -Es /usr/sbin/firewalld --nofork --nopid

Apr 01 14:15:22 nsa00systemd.willeat.your.babies.com systemd[1]: Starting firewalld - dynamic firewall daemon...

Apr 01 14:15:22 nsa00systemd.willeat.your.babies.com systemd[1]: Started firewalld - dynamic firewall daemon.

Microsoft dumps ARM for Atom with cut-price Surface 3 fondleslab

Re: Bob, Zune, Clippy, and Steve Ballmer

Yes, how about 92% of the world's office desktop computers and laptops?

Poor poor Microsoft...

Re: MS is trapped

"""Users don't buy machines to run the OS, they buy them to run their applications."""

Thank you! I have been saying that for years and no one seems to get it.

Re: MS is trapped

This is how systemd is destroying Linux:

- I wonder what the status of my cluster is...

systemctl status pcsd.service

pcsd.service - PCS GUI and remote configuration interface

Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/pcsd.service; enabled)

Active: active (running) since Tue 2015-03-31 18:20:38 BST; 18h ago

Main PID: 577 (pcsd)

CGroup: /system.slice/pcsd.service

├─577 /bin/sh /usr/lib/pcsd/pcsd start

├─593 /bin/bash -c ulimit -S -c 0 >/dev/null 2>&1 ; /usr/bin/ruby -I/usr/lib/pcsd /usr/lib/pcsd/ssl.rb

└─594 /usr/bin/ruby -I/usr/lib/pcsd /usr/lib/pcsd/ssl.rb

systemctl status corosync.service

corosync.service - Corosync Cluster Engine

Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/corosync.service; enabled)

Active: active (running) since Tue 2015-03-31 18:20:47 BST; 18h ago

Process: 1558 ExecStart=/usr/share/corosync/corosync start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Main PID: 1652 (corosync)

CGroup: /system.slice/corosync.service

+-1652 corosync

Mar 31 18:20:46 nsa00.systemd.willeat.your.babies.com corosync[1652]: [VOTEQ ] Waiting for all cluster members. Current votes: 1 expected_votes: 2

Mar 31 18:20:46 nsa00.systemd.willeat.your.babies.com corosync[1652]: [QUORUM] Members[1]: 1

Mar 31 18:20:46 nsa00.systemd.willeat.your.babies.com corosync[1652]: [MAIN ] Completed service synchronization, ready to provide service.

Mar 31 18:20:46 nsa00.systemd.willeat.your.babies.com corosync[1652]: [TOTEM ] A new membership (192.168.56.31:68) was formed. Members joined: 2

Mar 31 18:20:46 nsa00.systemd.willeat.your.babies.com corosync[1652]: [VOTEQ ] Waiting for all cluster members. Current votes: 1 expected_votes: 2

Mar 31 18:20:46 nsa00.systemd.willeat.your.babies.com corosync[1652]: [QUORUM] This node is within the primary component and will provide service.

Mar 31 18:20:46 nsa00.systemd.willeat.your.babies.com corosync[1652]: [QUORUM] Members[2]: 1 2

Mar 31 18:20:46 nsa00.systemd.willeat.your.babies.com corosync[1652]: [MAIN ] Completed service synchronization, ready to provide service.

Mar 31 18:20:47 nsa00.systemd.willeat.your.babies.com corosync[1558]: Starting Corosync Cluster Engine (corosync): [ OK ]

Mar 31 18:20:47 nsa00.systemd.willeat.your.babies.com systemd[1]: Started Corosync Cluster Engine.

Great, systemd is giving me way more information and control than ever before, and it is modernizing the painful daemon/service management in Linux I must oppose it vehemently!

Re: MS is trapped

You do not know what you are talking about, clearly not a clue on the Windows side, and on the Linux side even less so.

Smart meters are a ‘costly mistake’ that'll add BILLIONS to bills

Re: IT disasters...

I have a bridge over here to sell you... comes with a smart meter for the toll.

Why Feed.Me.Pizza will never exist: Inside the world of government vetoes and the internet

Some people

Wonder why the new TLDs are a fiasco my dear Watson... oh yes they wonder.

Tim Cook: I'll give just a THIRD of what Gates gave to charity last year

Re: Charity?

"""I would love to know why you disagree"""

I think you suffer from a case of "mental mess" that's how I personally disagree.

Hey, Microsoft, we can call Windows 10 apps anything we like – you're NOT OUR REAL MOM

Care to elaborate...

As to why do we have to pay attention to Microsoft each time they fart?

Seriously. This was funny the first few times.

They should stop this universal crap nonsense once and for all. There is a reason no other vendor tries, in the end it doesn't work.

Jokes aside ElReg (or someone else for that matter) should stop producing articles about MS Bob and compile a list of all "programming things" MS has pitched as the next best thing and later abandoned, leaving a trace of dead bodies on their path.

VMware tells partners, punters, to pay higher prices (probably)

They need money

To pay the lawyers' expenses in their coming GPL court case.

Microsoft enlists web security pariah Adobe to help build Internet Explorer-killer Spartan

Re: So the Spartans have invited the Trojans around to advise on the decor?

Chapeau! the best comment!

+100 points for you sir, and a pint!

Linux kernel devs adopt Bill and Ted's excellent code of conduct

Re: The root of the issue...

Dear AC,

I think you nailed it.

"""In essence, some people behave badly when shown to be wrong - especially in public - and this is exacerbated if the tone is also inflammatory too."""

Some people just can not be helped.

And this is the reason why we have an invasion of the Politically Correct, and as I always say, the Political Correctness, one of these days is going to kill us all.

VMware sued, accused of ripping off Linux kernel source code

Re: tisk tisk VMWare

I'm not sure why that subverts the GPL, care to elaborate?

Re: interesting

"""All in all, it is an illustration of the old adage: "In how many places do you terminate a SCSI cable? In three - one end, the other end and terminate a black goat with a silver knife at new moon in the middle. Then it may work"."""

You weren't one of those guys who confused the physical end of the bus with the last device by number in the chain were you?

Re: How to help !

Jeremy,

Big thanks for your work! Both Rsync & Samba!

Snowden, NSA spying, hard drive malware ... what we need is a UN privacy watchdog!

Re: WTF?

Does the EFF thinks the UN is like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOLhQ6puoS4

Some of the current members of the human rights commission:

Saudi Arabia

Cuba

Venezuela

Pakistan

Russian Federation

China

All great defenders of human rights.

Mummy, what's the point of Evgeny Morozov's tedious columns?

Re: I do not think it means what you think it means...

Economics lesson number one.

Rich people are not rich because they have a money deposit full of it.

Rich people normally have to move that money around, some times in the form of salaries they pay or rents, other times in the form of resources like a building, or a car/van/lorry.

That inequality people talk about is just marxist propaganda.

Of course there are people who live in poverty (curiously less than ever in history) and something should be done about it, however socialism is not the answer, read more history on your encyclopedias (and contrast the information please, never use a single source).

Re: Evgeny Who?

Let's call Worstall and the guardian for what they are, shouldn't we?

Worstall is a marxist-socialist type, and the guardian is marxist-socialist media (pravda style!).

There you go, when people have information they can make informed decisions.

We're surrounded by marxists-commies in media and politics who have an opinion on how other people should live their lives, and obviously that it should be them who make those decisions and be paid for it with taxpayer money.

When those decisions prove not to work, they demand more power, more money and those dissenting to be silenced.

Rinse and repeat.

The Guardian...

Chances of a non-marxistst socialist-agreeing comment staying on the guardian's comments for more than two minutes are slim to none.

The BBC wants to slap a TAX on EVERYONE in BLIGHTY

Re: "universal levy could be put on every household"

They are the epitome of cultural Marxism, true defenders of the faith.

Of course they believe they have the right for us to fund them.

Silly you, and silly me.

Fire is not enough...

Re: Going back to the 50s

I do not watch TV, I do not use the BBC, I never read their farce of news online, and I got them blocked on my firewall so no one at home connects.

Why the FCUK would I have to pay them???? WHY????

Re: Worth the fee just for the website

Jon 9,

If I was to make a similar online service as the BBC, can I subsidize it at the expense of the the UK tax payer too?

Just asking.

"""Hall added that ten years ago the BBC and Apple had the same global revenues. "Today, Apple is 20 times bigger. Twenty times bigger. And that gives them colossal buying power.""""

Then the answer is clear, turn the BBC into a private company, make products people want to actually buy.

Oh no, I get it, the problem is that the BBC is so good we should have it forced down our throats because we are too ignorant to appreciate it.

Everybody running a public entity with public money ends with the same twisted ideas about the nature of reality and the work they do.

And as per the BBC being unbiased, DO NOT MAKE ME LAUGH, it is not funny.

Microsoft to Android OEMs: 'Show me the money'

Re: Like I always said

There never was any step forward.

"""Much has been made of the “new” Microsoft under chief executive Satya Nadella and his willingness to work with competing technologies and companies."""

MS has sanctioned Office on Android and iOS, as a whitewashing manoeuvre and to stop the proliferation of other office suites on those platforms, while at the same time relentlessly attacks Android.

"Microsoft loves Linux" It’s nonsense (albeit endlessly repeated) of the highest order, but enough people who are not keeping up with the news might actually fall for this nonsense and even pass it on.

Bill Gates once chose the word “cancer” to describe the operating system, and Gates is still a prominent member of the board.

"""but for Microsoft's legal team this is not a new era – it remains business as usual."""

As if the Microsoft legal team had nothing to do with the rest of Microsoft. :-(

Here comes Vulkan: The next generation of the OpenGL graphics API

Meanwhile in Linux land

MESA is still at OpenGL 3.1 level...

First peek at the next Ubuntu 15.04 nester line-up

XFCE

All the way!

"""One of the more lightweight Ubuntu flavours, Xubuntu 15.04 is shaping up to be a relatively minor release, or at least the portions pertaining to the Xfce desktop are."""

And that believe it or is a good thing, XFCE changes slowly and for the good of its users.

No crazy new paradigms here but proper refining.

Have it all: BlackBerry to port crown jewels to iPhone, Android

Remark

“crown jewels”...

BBM was a "crown jewel" when 90% of the market wasn't using whatsapp, hangouts, imessage, viber, line and so on.

What about...

Making a blackberry model that runs Android, and let us run a custom ROM?...

Because I would buy one of these.

Microsoft man: Internet Explorer had to go because it's garbage

Re: Can of worms...

>> Final question, are they insane?

No, they are engaged in a white-wash PR campaign of biblical proportions.

Re: Revisionist History

At the time they both entered an arms race of implementing incompatible features.

And at a later time Netscape had a very unstable browser that it eventually stopped loading pages for no other because it was feeling moody, while IE always seemed responsive and did not stop loading.

However it was MS who decided to turn their horrible-insecure-by-design browser into part of the OS, shove it down the throats of a mostly unsuspecting public who doesn't knew better at the time, and give it for free to further screw the competition.

And then holding the market captive for 10 years.

And no, if MS includes a new browser in Windows 10, IE is not going anywhere.

IE will still be there... forever, like most of MS's old shit that can be found all over the place in windows, or just think a copy of mshtml.dll is not going to be shipped with Windows 10? or Shdocvw.dll or WinInet.dll for that matter??? (Good luck using pop3 in outlook without those btw, ((Yes, it is that intermixed)))

MS is embarked on a whitewash marketing campaign, they are still the 96%-95% percent market dominance, in no danger of any immediate problem, however they have lots and lots of cash, they are aware they have an image problem, and they are going step by step on a long check-list trying to correct that, just in case one day they get competition and hey lose 1% of business based on a reputation issue.

MS hasn't changed an inch because Nadella is the visible head. And no that petty whitewash .NET open sourcing exercise is not proper open source no matter how you look at it, LGPL, GPL, MIT or Apache or no cigar.

Linux kernel dev has gone well and truly corporate – report

Re: systemd

In my experience it is the other way around.

It is the anti-systemd crowd who has become hysterical.

In my experience the majority of the anti-crowd people is just repeating things they hear like screaming parrots.

No one is forcing anything on anybody, if you do not like it that much do not use it, or write your own, I'm sure you will do a great job and people will adopt it.

Re: systemd

Please stop with the FUD

RH is not forcing anything on anybody. Distro developers are adopting it because they see value on it.

Is it perfect no it is not, does it have problems, yes it does, does it solve a problem? yes, a very complex one no one has stepped in to solve.

I bet you're one of those who complain about Linux lack of coherence or fragmentation.

Re: Snowballing

Short history it doesn't work like in Windows.

Linux sees the drivers as loadable modules, the modules can be either made built-in (Useful for environments where your hardware does not change) or they can be made loadable upon boot.

When made loadable upon boot it is called a loadable kernel module, and they are files that live on your HD, plug in a device and they get loaded automatically as in the case of USB stuff, or upon booting in the case of a NIC.

Drivers in Linux are not "standalone" drivers for "standalone" hardware, most of the time they belong to what is called a "Driver family", this is a single driver supports multiple devices.

For example if two different network cards from two different vendors use the same chipset, the same driver will be used with both. This saves a lot of disk space and code work.

Usually the kernel and the drivers all come in the same package, this is because as they are modules they are intrinsically dependent on the kernel structures and headers.

To get support for a newer piece of hardware you can either get the source of a module and compile it yourself or wait until the next kernel version to come with the module already integrated.

And no, compiling stuff in Linux (building a kernel or a module) is not the chore most people with little Linux exposure think it is.

There is a learning curve like with everything, I do not know anyone who has mastered anything complex in Windows out of thin air.

Snowballing

Steadily unstoppable snowballing.

And before people think its becoming bloated, the majority of the increase in code is in the drivers, new and better drivers get added all the time on each new release.