Posts by NickHolland

Geico tells El Reg, no, it's not canceling all Cybertruck insurance

Re: Geico thinks that some CT Owners are Renting the Vehicle Out Under the Table

when I was young, our family of four had eight cars.

Why did we have eight cars? Because we sold one.

Currently, I own three cars, all licensed and insured, and four motorcycles, and I live alone.

My GF (who lives alone) has two cars. yes, I inspired that.

We love our cars. Just money holes, not renting or running a business from them.

(and to bring this back to the topic of computers and IT)

I call my collection the Redundant Array of Individual Cars.

Long time ago when I was self-employed, I was trying to impress on a CFO the importance of good backups. Finally, he decided to get personal and say, "Well, how many cars do you have?" I told him, "not only do I have three cars, but I'm driving the backup van today, the primary van is in the shop". We did get our backup system.

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

Re: Not a problem

considering how this particular salesperson's family seemed to grow nine months after a landing each big contract, yes, I think he did.

Side story: I recently came across this salesperson after not seeing him since the early 1990s. He actually remembered my MOTHER (his prenatal instructor) more than me (the person who made him quite well-off by supporting and sometimes landing all those big-contract customers). Ah, well...

Start your downvotes!

It is up to the company to decide the work rules based on what they think is best OVERALL for the company, and up to employees to decide if they wish to earn money by working under those rules.

I like working from home. I also value the time I spent at my current job in the office when I first hired in -- it helped me come up to speed rapidly AND I now know (and work well with) several of my coworkers in other teams much better than people who have barely stepped foot in the office in five years. I want to continue to be mostly WFH, but I also recognize many of my skills are best (or only) done "in person".

I've worked with someone who was GREAT at working from home before the world went crazy in 2020. He was easier to reach than most of his in-office teammates, always available, and clearly put in his hours. He treated WFH as a privilege he was granted and needed to continue to earn, not an expected entitlement. I've also worked with people who screamed, "I WORK BETTER FROM HOME! I GET MORE DONE! I'M MORE PRODUCTIVE", and yet, no one is quite sure what they accomplished, why it took so long, and why they were so hard to get ahold of when needed.

Unfortunately, it's really worker-by-worker, and that's shaky legal ground. "You let Mary work from home, why can't I?" isn't going to work well.

So much more to say, except I'm on the clock!

Re: Not a problem

yep... The scene: a past job, salesperson is packing up.

"I'm heading <big customer>, I'll head home from there when done"

coworker: "Jim, it's after 5:00pm. You can just say, 'I'm going home'. Besides, <big customer> went home a couple hours ago"

That was over 35 years ago

AT&T intends to quit VMware, Broadcom claims in legal broadside

Re: Its not about the licenses being used....

when I first saw VMware, I thought it was pretty cool tech.

Then...I started realizing their pricing model was based on "Look how much we save you on hardware! Now pay us 80% of that. See? you come out ahead!"

Now Broadcom's pricing model is based on, "Look how much it would cost to change platforms. Now, pay us 80% of that. See? you come out ahead!"

Lesson: if you are running commodity HW and OSs, make sure all parts of your system are replaceable with alternative products. And make sure you can do that.

Quick Payback and strong IRR

yeah, that was in-freaking-credible for them to put that in the public record.

I used to work at a Big Company, which had all kinds of training about what kind of things you should invoke the legal department over, The general process was, "if in doubt, run it past legal".

Sounds like Broadcom needs their legal department to run stuff past Marketing and PR. Just...Wow.

But now we also know AT&T runs obsolete and unsupportable applications. The company that basically invented much of computing...isn't even keeping stuff up to date. Sigh.

Putin really wants Trump back in the White House

I'm curious how you would have had the US be "first" in WW1 or WW2. Or Ukraine.

While I do not agree, a case could be -- and has been -- made that the US should not have been involved in any of those wars. They were not at US boarders. All three were clearly "European problems" (and "Asian problems", until Japan thought an attack on the US would be a great idea).

If the US gets involved, they are the world's bully. If they try to stay out, they are "yellow and lets everyone else do the fighting". Often in the exact same conflicts. Often described those ways by the same people.

Mainframes aren't dead, they're just learning AI tricks

cynical answer...

I suspect, being it is Kyndryl's survey, I suspect they meant "IBM Z systems".

What the respondents meant, no idea...

However, reading the statements with a cynical interpretation, it looks like a lot of people doing what everyone should do... "how do we get the best return from our investment". But often the answer is "not this way". (or politely telling Kyndryl, "yeah, we'll keep you in mind. Don't call us, we'll call you")

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

Re: Decisions, decisions...

Unfortunately, I disagree with the "Linux is getting better" part.

Linux has been taken over by people who hate Windows, but are intent on re-inventing poorly.

The question, "Should this be done?" is not asked -- just feature parity, which appears to be the definition of "better" for a lot of people. I'm sure it won't be long until someone adds AI to Linux, (probably systemd... "look! Smarter starup!"), but says, "This time, it is done right" (and they'll say it over and over).

I love Unix, and a Unix variant is my daily driver, but ... not Linux.

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

Re: Reputation

being this group is mostly IT people, I don't feel qualified to throw that stone, our collective glass house is REALLY REALLY thin glass.

Re: NASA has learned..

"It seems that NASA has finally learned how to properly assess risk."

I don't completely agree. Yes, better -- FAR better -- than continuing to fly the shuttle after numerous "we got away with it this time, let's assume we always will" decisions, but... they sent people up in a capsule that had yet to have an uneventful demo and attach it to the space station in a way that it would prove difficult to remove. Looks like a whole lot of "what do we do if it fails" thinking didn't take place, and a some "we'll hope that doesn't happen again" logic took place. Not as much learning as I would have hoped.

This uni thought it would be a good idea to do a phishing test with a fake Ebola scare

Re: Works for me...

Oh yeah.

Same job they sent the fake termination notices out, they used an "secure e-mail" system that basically sent you a link to click on to get your e-mail off a website.

So not at all infrequently, we'd get unexpected e-mails from people we'd never heard of about things we we didn't know about with a link to click on. And the same management that enforced "security and compliance training" expected us to violate exactly the guidelines they "trained" us on. I refused. I ain't clicking on that thing. (security team hated that service for that reason. Well, that, and a certain jackass (me) kept hitting "report phish". Don't know what bothered them more -- me hitting "Report Phish" or the fact that so few other people did.

Re: Works for me...

The problem is...you mentioned REAL WORLD scams that actually take place.

Which would you prefer: "your son's been killed" and turn out to be a phishing training drill, or "your son's been killed" AND they just used your emotions to penetrate your company's security systems, or your bank account, or... ?

People need to learn, think first, emotions later. They ARE out to get you. The bad guys don't give a rat's ass about your "feelings".

Works for me...

A few years ago, my employer sent out a fake termination e-mail. "please click on this link, download the forms, fill them out, sign them and take them to HR", something along those lines. I thought it was a brilliant test.

However, I had a new coworker -- very Inexperienced, but smart and trainable and hard-working. i.e., the dream young employee. However, while her experience was measured in months, the rest of us in the team measured our experience in decades. So...not too surprisingly, she had confidence problems. She got the fake termination phish test, and she told us she freaked out. And I fully sympathize.

BUT...you can't take tools off the table. If we say, "We won't train with 'shocking' content", there's how you get get your phish through. Shock them, horrify them, get them to drop their guard...and a-clicking they will go.

Security training needs to be brutal. Two-up bosses telling underlings to do things (and obviously, managers have to learn to accept people questioning their questionable demands). Disease alerts. Termination notifications. Meet the new coworker. Department after-work party. And drop the stupid "misspellings and bad grammar should be your tip-off" b***s***, because if the target is worth the effort, they'll find someone who can write good $LOCALLANGUAGE.

Re: Priorities?

That's exactly what should be happening..

EMAIL CAN NOT BE TRUSTED. Period.

All the attempts to bolt "security" on a fundamentally insecure protocol just don't work. The ones that are technically sound are too complicated for normal users, who can't figure out the difference between a lock indicator on the URL bar and a lock graphic in the web page.

People have to learn that you can't trust e-mail. If a "genuine health warning" is sent out via e-mail and that's the only way it is sent, then the senders need to learn how to do their job properly.

X.org lone ranger rides to rescue multi-monitor refresh rates

Re: The proliferation of refresh rates has always been a PITA

I get your point...but no.

Long ago (Win95 days, iirc), a friend of mine bought a beautiful huge (I'm thinking 21" or 25", but I don't recall exactly) high-end high-res monitor... and he ran it at 640x480. Why? Because he was hard of vision. It was a great option for him. I'm glad he had that option to run his fantastic monitor at lousy res and performance. It made me cringe inside when I saw this monitor that was so much better than anything I had running at that 1988 resolution, but it worked for him, and worked very well.

Keep in mind, a monitor used to be a major investment. One great thing about commodity HW is you can buy it (quoting Johnny Cash) One Piece at a Time, and a good monitor could and did last several computers. So today, you buy a computer, you use it with your old monitor. In a few years, you buy a new monitor, and use it with your old computer. I've got 10+ years out of my good monitors on several occasions (I'm just now retiring some 24" LCD monitors I bought probably around 2010). You could use old computers on new monitors, new computers on old monitors. Things didn't have to be matched.

The bundled monitor and video card has been around for decades -- as you mentioned, Sun, but also early Macintosh "big monitors". They were expensive, a huge investment, and I had a fair number of orphaned monitors and cards, where one came obsolete (or failed) when the other was 100% functional but useless. It is hard to justify an expensive fixed frequency, fixed resolution monitor when commodity flexible monitors are as good or better AND CHEAPER and much more useful over time.

Things have changed and stayed the same. I'm writing this on a 43" 4k TV-used-as-monitor that I paid $190US for, and I'm at a point in my life where that is an impulse purchase. It is better than any CRT I've ever owned, so you might think I'd be happy to toss it when I buy a new computer (for also not much money). But it is attached to several different computers currently, and sometimes, it gets attached to a computer that can't do 3840x2160, so it nicely falls back to whatever the old computer I've attached to it. So even with our now cheap hw and monitors, I'm still very glad I don't have to pair monitors and computers 1:1 and purchase them 1:1.

CockroachDB scuttles away from open source Core offering

Re: CockroachDB

sounds like they may not have been surviving the open source model...

SpaceX tries to wash away Texas pollution allegations

Re: "forced to add a water deluge system"

somewhere, I think I saw something that stated that SpaceX was somewhat surprised the first Starship launch went as well as it did -- there was some happy surprise it cleared the tower. IF true, I think that explains the seemingly obviously insufficient launch structure. If you are concerned there's a high possibility that the entire thing might go "BOOM"...why spend a lot of effort on the launch structure that is likely to be destroyed?

Also...ultimately, Starship is supposed to take off from unprepared sites (moon, Mars). We just don't have much experience with that. Yes, we've landed things, but in the case of Apollo, what took off basically used the landing stage as a launch platform. Might have been highly educational to find out how rocket exhaust tosses things around. Total speculation on my part.

Low orbit satellites for phone service may cause more light pollution

Re: benefits vs. costs

oh, I agree with you on the grandeur of the creations of humans. but I'm not everyone. Put up a new cell tower, people whine. Usually the same people complaining about the poor reception in the area that caused the new tower to go up.

As for people going places they shouldn't without sufficient plans to get out of trouble...well, to a degree, blame the technology. As a young person, I would sometimes explore places I probably shouldn't have been, but also knew that I might have a long walk out if I broke the car, or slipped on a wet rock, etc. But now, people are so used to whipping out their cell phone and magic happens. And you don't need to be in the middle of the ocean. I know a whole town that, at least as of a few years ago, had ZERO cellular coverage and I think they liked it that way. So...just walking a few hundred feet off the established trail, you might be in deep trouble if you didn't have someone else with you to go for help. 50 years ago, portable radio communications was hit-and-miss. Today, it's amazing how effortless talking to someone on the other side of the world is. It's easy to forget that still isn't universal (and sometimes, by design).

benefits vs. costs

so... the alternative to space based cellular is ground-based towers, which are ugly eye-sores. And I know people who live in very affluent areas near me where they don't want cell towers in their back yards, and the cellular coverage is -- as one would expect -- bad. This same area, most nights are at best hazy, and often outright cloudy. So...tower vs. satellite? I suspect they go for satellite. Heck, if I could look up and see some twinkling satellites, I'd say that's way cool, far more so than what I can normally see (which is not much).

And then...there's the public benefit. How many lives could be saved if someone in the middle of a lake or ocean or deep in an cellular free area could summon help with their common cell phone? How many will be saved by more detailed images of Mars or a star (I think it is safe to say the answer to that is "precisely zero")? How many pretty star pictures compensate for a human life?

Satellite positions are very precisely known at all times, both instantly and in the future. This isn't my area of expertise, but it would seem that between modern digital imaging and digital image processing, it would probably be easier to say, "ignore these pixels at these times" than it is to, say, make a five pawed cat with ears on backwards (and call it AI). Heck, call the predictive pixel ignoring "AI" and get someone else to pay for the R&D work...

Hey, I get it, I'd rather reduce nighttime light pollution than increase it...but we have decisions to make. And seeing a cell tower on the top of every hill is not my idea of great, either.

NASA mulls using SpaceX in 2025 to rescue Starliner pilots stuck on space station

Re: Boeing should provide Test Pilots

"That supplier is in the same congressional district as this other supplier. Please find a supplier in Senator X's state or Congressperson Y's district"

Things becomes easier to understand when you realize NASA and other government operations are jobs programs directed by people who like to talk about what they did for their local district at the expensive of the rest of the country.

Blaming Boeing is easy...and not wrong, but we also have to look at the people directing Boeing's decisions based on the products they asked Boeing to make, and the people that put them in power...and that's us, the voters. WE vote for the people that promise to bring stuff to OUR area at the expense of the rest of the country. No one will get into office saying, "eh, we are doing fine, send our tax money elsewhere".

NASA pushes back missions to the ISS to buy time for Starliner analysis

Re: Really?

It can't be just "pointed" at earth, it has to be powered down out of orbit. And ... the Starliner was designed to NOT burn up in re-entry, so how and where it comes down matters. If you manage to get it away from the ISS and dip into the atmosphere to slow it down and cause reentry, you want it to hit water and not likely to hit a ship or an airplane (granted, hitting a ship or an airplane would be very unlikely, but there's a reason they normally clear expected landing areas of ship and aircraft traffic). So even hooking a tow-rope on it and pulling it down with a SpaceX launch would be "tricky".

It's a bloomin' mess, really.

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Re: Came here for the absolute loons saying it's better than Word

here's a simple metric -- time between hitting a key and it showing up on the screen.

Windows and other GUI applications absolutely suck at this. And yet, WP and WS and other DOS applications were doing just fine on 16MHz procs 30+ years ago.

And I'd call that both a sane and important metric. One that our modern computing world REALLY sucks at.

Re: All I recall...

document mode never bothered me too much -- write a little program to strip the top bit to zero for all characters, and your "document" file turned into pure text.

Ok, I guess that shows my age when the answer to a problem was "write a program to fix it".

Re: Admirable

I started with WordStar on a pre-PC system, and my fingers got very good at "just doing" what I needed. But..I did start a process of transitioning to "something else" in the PC world. I never got to the level with WordPerfect 5.1 that I was t with WordStar, but I can say with confidence, WP5.1 was a better tool. I think that says something about just how good WP was -- experienced WS user becomes a novice WP convert and says, "this is better".

To this day, I use vi with some .exrc macros to do some WP5-like stuff with the function keys in my Unix life -- mostly HTML tags.

Shuttle Columbia's near-miss: Why we should always expect the unexpected in space

Re: All the more reason to send robots, instead

I'm inclined to think the moon walk was worth something, too. Especially at the time, since the options of robots was very limited.

But I'm having trouble explaining why. Most of the given reasons just don't hold up. "humans can do things machines can't" yep. Including die. If you have a limit of one probe/human landing, ok, sure, the human can do stuff not-planned at launch better. But you can just send another probe later with the lessons learned from the previous one. And probes are less likely to contaminate other places. Contamination on the moon? probably no big deal. Mars, which has an atmosphere, water, and still questions about what life may have been or might still be there -- That could be an ecosystem changing event.

As for Hubble... What if...instead of being built to fit inside the Shuttle, it was built to fit on a more versatile rocket...put higher, and when it was found to be fatally flawed, de-orbited and replaced, or left in orbit a while to find the other weak points (i.e., gyros) to make the next version better? Each shuttle flight was very expensive, and apparently had a more than 1% chance of the death of the crew...how did the cost (including risk of loss of life) of all those supporting shuttle flights compare to just replacing Hubble? Just think of the telescope we could have put into orbit on the top of a Saturn V instead of trying to cram something into the Shuttle (and the Saturn V, it turns out, probably would have been CHEAPER!).

I love what Hubble did...but I'm not sure it was the best way to do it. How about...instead of trying to get 30+ years out of it, we just put cheaper stuff with current tech out there, and replace it when we can do significantly better?

It is 60 years since a US spacecraft first took a close-up of the Moon

tell us more...

Please...write your stories down while you can. As someone who has lived a little history myself...I'm often shocked and amazed by the modern retellings by people who think they have "the" story, but in reality, only know one little part (and often, I realize *I* have just one little part, too).

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Re: Thanks for all your hard work fixing things.

long before UberEats ... a sales person I worked with got himself deep in a hole on some sale...don't recall the exact details, but something like 500 laptops needed modems installed before being shipped out the next day. Whole store got on the project, set up a few assembly lines to open boxes, stuff modem, close and retape box, etc. And this was when the commission on a few hundred laptops was non-trivial, but not only was he the only one getting commission on this sale, IIRC, other sales people chipped in to get these machines all upgraded in time. Those that weren't opening or closing boxes or spinning screw drivers were answering phones and dealing with walk-ins.

We did it...salesperson says, "Thanks everyone! I'm buying the store Pizza tomorrow for lunch!" This was cool. This was still when Pizza for lunch at work was some kind of extravagant event. So the next day...we all show up hungry for lunch...and J walks in with one...small...cheap pizza. For 13 people. We all looked at each other, grabbed our one slice, and then went out for lunch...on our own dime.

Re: Superb episode once again, letting the Boss dig himself deeper and deeper into hole

In the middle of a mess, I once told my boss, "one of us is leaving the room right now. If a speedy recovery is your desire, I suggest it be you, but I'm fine either way".

I've had bosses that I WANTED next to me during a problem, whether it be for guidance, a sounding board, or running interference for other managers. But I've worked for a few that needed to be in another room, and one that knew he was such an ass, he knew to not be seen until the event was over.

Sadly, it seems the good boss is getting rarer and rarer...

Boeing Starliner crew get their ISS sleepover extended

Re: Island Getaway

brilliant. Someone more cleaver than me needs to finish that as a parody...

Scammers double-scam victims by offering to help recover from scams

Perhaps spam filters are not our friends.

I sometimes wonder if our investment in spam filtering is ultimately bad. Users see so little of what people are attempting to do to them, they think it remarkable when it actually gets through -- or worse...assume it must be legit if it got through our magic filters.

I have a very simplistic spam filtering system on my personal mail server (grey listing)...and yes, there's nothing new about this one at all. Some of it may be targeting the already scammed (why sell the info to other people? just re-scam them yourself!), but I'm seeing a lot of random, just assume I already lost money to them, and "let me help you recover your lost money". But this is not the first time I've seen people claim something new is happening that I've seen for years.

When a crime is cheap to attempt, the benefit is big if successful and the risks of punishment are low, the crime is going to take place.

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Plan 256, from the depths of heck.

Long ago, it was said, "Those who don't understand Unix are bound to reinvent it, poorly".

Now we got Linux trying to reinvent Windows...poorly.

The current user base for Linux appear to be frustrated Windows users, hating Windows, but intent on recreating it. The leaders are afraid to say, "no, bad idea" to anyone's new code, no one gets recognized for improving existing code, they want to have their name on the replacement for something.

Let the downvoting begin...

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

Re: abundance of options

yeah, there are options, but ... if I were in the RHEL ecosystem, I'd be looking at their history of support before IBM ("you need help with your license problems, we can do that...anything else? Better off with google"). their current owners (IBM) and their reputation for careful product maintenance (that was sarcasm), confusing "Adding Value" with "Raising Prices", and their recent jerking around the CentOS community, RH would NOT be the direction I'd be looking for long-term commitments.

If it wasn't for Broadcom stealing the show for customer abuse, we'd probably be talking about IBM/RH abusing their customers.

Re: VMWare dropped the ball years ago

well...I don't think VMware or Broadcom cares a lot about the desktop user running Windows on their Mac. That wasn't their bread and butter... They literally gave away server software much more powerful (their ESXi product --may it rest in peace). They really didn't care about that. If someone ran VMware workstation or whatever they called it on their Mac or PC and that influenced them go go with VMware in their data center, great, however unlikely it might be (though I'm sure a few people who ran VMware Workstation assumed they were now VMware experts). If they snag a few extra bucks from their big money clients for little stuff for the desktop, fine. But it was all lost in rounding errors on their bottom line.

But I agree with your overall statement -- VMware pre-Broadcom was abusing their customer base with license rule changes, cranky fat clients and when they finally came up with a web client, they made probably the very last big Adobe flash application when all the rest of the world had realized Flash was a Bad Idea and HTML5 was good. And, I've never forgiven them for allowing a time bomb intended to keep testes from running beta software "too long" to slip into a release (Aug 2008?). They owned the market because no one got fired for buying VMware...and they knew it and it showed for well over a decade.

Broadcom just makes it so painful, now people are going to get fired if they don't get off VMware. That's really a stunning accomplishment, but as the article indicated, all of VMware is now a rounding error in Broadcom's business.

Can AI models trained on human speech help us understand dogs?

bird language

I thought bird songs were fairly well understood. "Let's have sex!"

Mystery miscreant remotely bricked 600,000 SOHO routers with malicious firmware update

Re: Damage

except...how many ISPs keep $60 million routers sitting on the shelf ready for swap-out? Or the staff to distribute that many quickly?

I'm still trying to figure out how 600,000 people fell off the Internet and no one noticed.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Re: I call BS! This research is anecdotal at best, intentionally slanted at worst

well, I see you said what I was about to say...

Small modern gas cars are VERY, much quieter than an urban environment at "near-humans-walking-in-front-of-them" speeds. I've had gas powered cars sneak up on me a few times in parking lots and was surprised to see it was a boring, ICE. Not an EV, not a hybrid.

SO IF there is a problem (and there may well be), let's address the REAL problem, not single out a subset.

Long-term supported distros' kernel policies are all wrong

Re: Long Term Support is Long Term Problem

At a past job which was a paid RH shop, we found RH support to be 100% useless UNLESS it was about a licensing problem. So... we paid money to get assistance with the tools that shut our systems down to make sure we paid the money to get support for free software.

To be fair, a current coworker assured me they were very useful to a former employer of his -- which had tens of thousands of RH licenses. So if you are really really big, perhaps you can get useful support out of RH. But in the hundreds count...nope.

Long Term Support is Long Term Problem

Having worked at a number of companies, I've seen the same pattern over and over with RH and RH-like systems: Long Term Support leads to unmaintainable systems. Same thing happens almost every time:

1) Project is installed

2) Patches are done regularly

3) People who set up the system leave the company

4) People keep using the old system as it was

5) Deadline for the end of LTS starts creeping up

6) Panic! We must update!

7) Realization sinks in that no one understands how the system works, no one dares touch it.

8) No updates are done

9) Hope you get a new job before it "matters"

10) Efforts to replace old system are nixed by management because, the old system is "working"

11) the old system keeps on running.

12) goto step 7

Now, I'm sure someone has a system that's been running on RH for 15 years, managed by several generations of staff and upgraded from RH5 to RH9 in a timely manner, using carefully written documentation. But it is rare.

I've seen all kinds of excuses as to why this won't happen THIS time, but ... go ahead, prove me wrong.

Let's not forget the case where the application requires newer versions of add-on packages (i.e., PHP) than the LTS distribution provides. That's a great way to reach step 7 before the LTS is up. The OS may be patched, but the application updates require a new version of something that's not in the distribution.

The only REAL way I see out of this trap is to do VERY regular OS and application updates -- at least yearly. Every time, someone new should do the update to test the documentation and shared knowledge, with the previous people on reserve in case something goes wrong. If you can't manage the update, you have the old one to live on while you figure out how to re-implement or replace the product.

Lords of May-hem: Seven signs it is Oracle's year end

Re: Who would voluntarily deal with this company

one picky detail: Oracle was not the downfall of Sun and SPARC. Sun and their products were already too expensive for the performance delivered by the time Oracle purchased them. The SPARC endgame was already clear. Commodity HW with a choice of OS was winning.

But yes, I'm surprised "Get off Oracle" was not everyone's business plan 15 years ago.

Tesla self-driving claims parked in court

Non-Tesla owners have been impacted, too

I know a young person who decided during their driver's ed days, they didn't take driving instruction seriously, because of all the "self-driving cars are almost here!" hype. "I don't need to! The car will drive itself soon!"

Ten years later, this person is now a stunningly mediocre and indifferent driver, who for a number of years, was on a first-name basis with a traffic court lawyer and probably a few judges. I suspect this isn't the only person who did this.

I love my EV (Fiat 500e -- about as non-Tesla as you can get), I love my gas guzzlers. I appreciate what Tesla (and perhaps more -- their fanatical owners and investors that poured money into a money losing operation for years) did for the mainstreaming and advancement of EVs. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have happened at the rate it has without them.. But the self-driving thing... that was just scary and wrong from the beginning, and in my mind, obviously so. And yet, the Tesla hype machine made lots of other companies invest in this misguided technology and unrealistic promises, and got the media chanting "self-driving cars are almost here!"

Re: What is it with car salesmen and lying?

Forty years ago, the joke was, "What's the difference between a used car salesperson and a computer salesperson?"

A: "The used car salesperson knows when he's lying to you"

Now...considering the amount of computing power and control in the modern car, perhaps that joke flops because .. they are the same now?

Clean Air Act complaint paints smoggy picture at Tesla Fremont factory

Re: This shouldn't be considered a problem...

I think the US auto industry switched to water-based (not water soluble) in the 1990s. However, the emissions sounded like it was more than the solvent, sounds like the pigments were escaping. In doing a little reading, I have found one place that claims that primers and clear-coats are still VOC based -- not sure if that is true or not.

Ex-Space Shuttle boss corrects the record on Hubble upgrade mission

The Apollo (and Mercury, and Gemini) crews were military and/or test pilots, and other people used to putting their lives on the line...and they knew the odds of their safe return to earth were definitely not 100%. They knew it. The population knew it. Armstrong would have been 100% right to abort and give up. But it turns out...he was even more right to "go for it". And he got away with it, and that's why we sent test pilots to space...because they were used to that kind of instant decision making, and "go for it" if there was a reasonable chance of success. I wouldn't be surprised if his thought at that instant was, "I'd rather die on the moon than live with having got THIS CLOSE and aborted",

Shuttle was sold as "safe" and a finished product. Commoditized space flight!

The shuttle failed on basically all its promises -- wasn't cheap (more expensive, KG to orbit, than Apollo!), wasn't rapid turn-around, wasn't capable, and it turns out, it wasn't safe. And we kept on flying it as-is. No one had the guts to say, "Well, this didn't work out, let's fix it" or even "well, our design criteria was wrong. Let's start over with lessons learned".

Clock is ticking for NASA to fix bucket of issues before next Artemis mission

Re: Could have been worse

heck, SpaceX could have rebuilt it faster than NASA would pick a contractor to submit a bid fix it.

And of course ultimately, it will be the same contractor that made the error in the first place...because, lowest bidder!

(which isn't necessarily NASA's fault -- they have rules they have to work within)

Broadcom has willingly dug its VMware hole, says cloud CEO

The lesson coming out of it...

For every product your business purchases (or uses, in the case of FOSS) there has to be an exit plan -- a way to move to another product when something about the existing product becomes undesirable, or another product becomes more desirable.

Maybe the Broadcom/VMware fiasco will remind decision makers that getting off of a platform must be part of the implementation plan, and that your vendors/providers are NOT your friends -- it is in their interest to keep you captive as best they can. Currently, it's VMware. Previously, it was Linux distros based on RedHat. Open Source may permit more time for the change, but unless your company is in a position to take over development and maintenance of an FOSS project, you can't assume someone else will step up.

Side benefit: if you are ready to swap platforms, you will probably be in a better position to maintain your existing platforms.

I'm dreaming, of course.

Want to keep Windows 10 secure? This is how much Microsoft will charge you

Re: Year of Lunix desktop

Considering the thrashing that Linux does in their enviroment, Windows is looking really stable.

REALLY stable.

File system of the month, firewall of the year, window manager of the release.

Moving someone to Linux would be a big learning curve, followed by another and another. And the novice Ubuntu user will not be able to help the novice Debian user (even though they share roots)

Windows is way ahead of Linux in this regard. And that is with acknowledging that Windows does some pretty mindless thrashing, too. Just not as insane as Linux.

Malicious SSH backdoor sneaks into xz, Linux world's data compression library

how many compressions systems do we need?

allow me to toss out a point I haven't seen mentioned...why do we need xz so embedded into the system?

gzip is pretty much standard unix these days. Don't think we could live without it. We need gzip.

But do we really need xz that tightly embedded into the system? Modern computers have lots of disk space, lots of bandwidth, is a 20% (if that much) improvement over gzip really worth the complexity of additional compression protocols? I've been using compression utilities for 40 years...I'm thinking no.

If you want xz or bzip or rzip or 7z or rar or pigz or... go ahead, add it. But why is the basic system thinking it needs it? I've only used xz when someone hands me a file already compressed with xz.

Imagine if the time spent integrating xz into Linux was spent auditing gzip and other things?

Do one thing, do it well, and make sure it is done correctly.

The self-created risk in Broadcom's big VMware kiss-off

Product replacement must be part of any product selection process

People don't like to hear this, but critical to any product selection process has to be a "What do we do *when* this product becomes no longer viable to us for any reasons?" -- and that has to be BEFORE the purchase or commitment is made.

How do you get your documents out of an old document imaging system? How do you get your data out of an old backup system? How do you migrate your e-mail out of the new e-mail server you are looking at to some future product? When OS whatever becomes undesirable, how to you migrate to another OS? Open Source HELPS, but only to a degree, as RedHat has shown. This is really getting more critical with the "software as a service" and cloud service providers, where you may not even have physical access to your data -- what do you do if the service provider suddenly closes their doors? The vendor will always say, "We won't do that" -- but that's the same thing every company that has closed up suddenly has said at one point.

A lot of VMware's customers have been around a lot longer than VMware has been. Nothing lasts forever, few things in IT last, period.

Also...a product replacement plan just helps with OS upgrades, too. If you can deal with swapping out product X for product Y, you can deal with upgrading the OS to the next version.

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

Give Proxmox another chance -- it looks like it has made some interesting progress in the last few years. The UI ain't bad, really...though I'm still having trouble figuring out what it is doing under the covers (ok, I just created a VM. I have no idea what physical disk it landed on. But I'm very new with it...).

I'll admit, installation didn't go well on the one machine I was really hoping to use, it went further than ESXi did -- ESXi refused to recognize the SAS interfaces the disks were on. Entertainingly, the box was actually etired Nutanix hardware.

What I'm liking about Proxmox is that it IS a set of applications on a full Linux install, whereas ESXi was definitely based on Linux, but so many tools were yanked out or highly restricted from a standard Linux install, it was annoying to know what I wanted to accomplish, but not sure how to accomplish it in THIS environment.