* Posts by FrankAlphaXII

966 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jan 2011

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The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April

FrankAlphaXII

A little (potential) context

I live in New Mexico. In Albuquerque specifically. While I'm not sure what the exact reason is I can guess they're anticipating funding cuts from less money being made from the Permian Basin's oil and gas extraction which is affecting education across the State.

Don't make education funding dependent on something variable like fossil fuel extraction, folks, it's a pretty bad idea.

State may also anticipate losing a lawsuit over a murder one of their Basketball players committed in Albuquerque (State is in Las Cruces) at UNM in December 2022 that may result in a little penny pinching.

Europe's Ariane 6 rocket rated 'ready to rumble' after passing hot fire test

FrankAlphaXII

Its in everyone's interests that there's competition, the more the better really.

Ariane was the just about the only thing that kept ULA and it's predecessors "honest" (in the typical twisted defense contractor manner of speaking "honest") for a long time before anyone thought SpaceX was a serious competitor.

And if I'm not mistaken the JWST was launched on an Ariane 5, so it's not like there's no US interest in the ESA's programs just regardless.

CompSci teachers panic as Replit pulls the plug on educational IDE

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

Amazing that it doesn't sound like it's changed at all in 20 years. I started my career in school

IT. I immediately realized it was a clownshow and for all the reasons you described.

What's really going on with Chrome's June crackdown on extensions – and why your ad blocker may or may not work

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Just use Firefox

Been saying this since 2003 but it's screaming into a Galactic void at this point.

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

FrankAlphaXII

That's precisely what I was going to say, except I'd go one further and say about 30 years but I pay a lot of attention to ISAs.

ARM has been the "next big architecture" since about the Archimedes. I also remember when PowerPC, Alpha, and IA-64 were all going to "replace" x86 at one time or another.

I dunno about you but it's been a long time since I've seen an Itanium or an Alpha in the wild.

Having read the room, Unity goes back to drawing board on runtime fee policy

FrankAlphaXII

Re: It's a shame, really

Unity isn't open source. Like at all. It's always been proprietary.

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Really?

We already have it on FreeBSD and its decent. It's not that difficult to get working with a DE either, I use Wayland with KDE as my daily driver on that OS if I'm using a GUI there anymore actually. OpenBSD is working on it from what the article says, it'll probably wind up being the same way over there but I can't speak to it.

Google's next big idea for browser security looks like another freedom grab to some

FrankAlphaXII

He's likely talking about the SCCM clientside software manager. My employer only has Chrome and Edge listed in it as well, but Firefox and one of the un-trademarked Firefox rebrands is permitted and they get used fairly frequently, not least by me.

FrankAlphaXII

Re: ODFO, alphagoo.

Probably the most upset and irritated I've ever seen your writing here Jake. And you've been around here about as long as I have so that says quite a bit.

Regardless, I agree that trying to rewrite the rules to enforce a monopoly and browser monoculture is foolish. I don't think it's going to work, as soon as Google gets distracted you'll never hear another word about it. What worries me is a more focused company that doesn't kill its projects like it's going out of style doubling down on this.

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

FrankAlphaXII

Re: an 'el cheapo' no-support license for RHEL?

Not to defend IBMhat but they do have free licenses for RHEL for developers that you can use for non-production machines. It's definitely no replacement for CentOS but it does exist.

Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Opensolaris anyone?

It's not quite the same, Oracle decided they didn't want to do it anymore so the community forked it into Illumos and OpenIndiana. It's still a thing. OpenZFS is a Illumos project if I'm not mistaken.

This is more IBM being belligerent toward a community that pretty much worked as free advertising for RHEL for a long time to squeeze a couple bucks out of the community. I don't know how many times I sold RHEL because I had the client try out CentOS, now if I'm doing something stable where Fedora isn't appropriate but FreeBSD is overkill, it's mostly Debian derivatives like Ubuntu that I wind up using, and I'm not their biggest fan so it says a lot. I wish I trusted Oracle enough to use theirs but I don't.

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

FrankAlphaXII

That's pretty much how I see it too.

Those of us who can and care to may want to consider donating to the SFLC. They're likely going to need it, fighting IBM over this and whatever else they try and do is going to take forever and cost a fortune, think SCO v. The World writ even larger.

I really wonder what Oracle is going to do here since isn't their Linux basically just RHEL with Oracle branding?

Double BSD birthday bash beckons – or triple, if you count MidnightBSD 3.0

FrankAlphaXII

Re: OpenBSD is intentionally limited...

Try that on a Windows, Linux or FreeBSD machine and its about the same, there's a lot of overhead with OSes that don't have their existence predicated on security. Which isn't very surprising as Theo and Co make it a point to have the smallest attack surface as possible OOB. I'm not a fan of his personally but I do have a lot of respect for OpenBSD though I don't tend to use it unless I need something highly secure without much fucking around with it (there's always going to be some, even with how secure it is by default), FreeBSD has long been my UNIXlike of choice with Fedora and RHEL a close second and third but there's a time and a place for something like OpenBSD.

IBM, Kyndryl cut jobs even after cutting ties

FrankAlphaXII

I give them another 3 to 5 years

They still have some parts they can sell to Lenovo though its getting to be mighty slim pickins.

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Kyndryl has started up a dedicated ServiceNow practice

With snow it may as well be the same thing. I feel like Im being beaten with a cable every time I use it. Its a miracle anything actually gets done.

Intel reveals pay-to-play Xeon features with software-defined silicon

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Nothing new here

Its called Binning and they most certainly still do it. It saves them money by being able to sell a processor that they'd otherwise have to destroy. I don't know how common it is for other manufacturers but I know Nvidia does the same and Id imagine Samsung and TSMC do it as well.

Koch-funded group sues US state agency for installing 'spyware' on 1m Android devices

FrankAlphaXII

Fuck the Koch drones but

Fuck the Commonwealth of Massachusetts too.

Big question is what else were they doing with the data and who else had access to it? I'm quite sure DPH were willing to hand over any data that was requested to the Staties, Boston or Springfield Police because thats how it works there. Same with UMass. And the joint Commonwealth-DHS Fusion Centers. And DSS or whatever they call it now.

Massachusetts has never seen an invasion of privacy that it didn't like and as much as I abhor conservative SIGs I really don't trust the Commonwealth with anything like this because they use whatever they can get to fuck with people.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Tonight's Headline

Its the same in the US. If the State or US Attorney wants to prosecute, they will whether the victim wants to do so or not.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

FrankAlphaXII

Re: But there's a 486 in the Hubble telescope.......

Its probably on an ancient version of an RTOS called VTRX. There are other Electro-Optical and Synthetic Arperture Radar satellites looking the other direction which use it as well which is why I'm not getting into detail here, but its a known quantity.

Google delays execution of doomed Chrome extensions

FrankAlphaXII

Re: How does this affect filtering?

I can bet some of them probably won't work when they switch over. However, If the addon developers are any good they'll have been testing against chromium builds with the new version of manifest and it should work. I would fully expect something to not work though, have a failover ready for a few days. That's just good advice in general but whenever software like this gets changed, shit breaks unexpectedly. And its always the worst possible component that there's no good workaround for.

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

FrankAlphaXII

Its funny, when I was in school for networking (Dual enrollment my senior year of high school, we did Net+ and A+ and started MCSE) around 2002 they were using the OSI model to teach TCP/IP.

FrankAlphaXII

The first 3 Command and Conquer games had IPX/SPX LAN networking, the 4th one, Red Alert 2 may have had it as well but everything I was doing was TCP/IP by then.

I think the first Starcraft and first two Warcraft games also may have had it but I know for a fact that Command and Conquer did.

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Seventy-one in six years?!?!?

That's the point. They're asset stripping. It's Icahn and TWA all over again. I'm sure it'll be a model for every Harvard MBA to follow for years to come.

FrankAlphaXII

They're more fucked for the apparently systemic securities fraud than anything. Which is complete bullshit, people are more important than lying about sales to gild the garmets of some Ivy League MBA business criminal cabron, but Wall Street don't ever care about the people getting hurt, only how their stack of money may have been affected by one of their own kind.

I'm sure they'll sell more parts of themselves to Lenovo, maybe mainframes this time, especially since it's a toxic asset with a securities fraud investigation surrounding it.

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

FrankAlphaXII

Fair and Balanced

I must say all of the criticism in this article is all very fair and they're all things I've either seen myself or didn't see directly but helped out with remotely.

The only issue is that I have to disagree with saying Pop!_OS a niche, barely used distro with noone working on it because of System76 having paid employees working on it and the fact it comes pre-installed on their notebooks and workstations. HP's even about to start selling a workstation (it's basically a ZBook Studio 15 without the 300 dollar Windows 10 for Workstations tax) in the US called the Dev One that has it pre-installed as well.

I especially liked the bit about trusting Oracle more than IBMhat because at the moment I do. And if you look at my comment history I trust Oracle about as much as a Politician so there's not much faith there. IBM gets even less. Wonder how long it'll take them to sell Red Hat to Lenovo.

Day 7 of the great Atlassian outage: IT giant still struggling to restore access

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Business continuity

Amen. I'm in IT (now, again, whatever) but I come from an Emergency Management background. I really hope all of these affected customers had a decent continuity plan that had been exercised realistically and not merely as a means of checking off some VC's checklist to get funding. My standards are probably a bit high but think I know the answer to that by even a more reasonable measure if some of the Twitter threads I've read are any indication.

BCP is like how security used to be back in the day, nobody took it seriously until it started to cost more to not give a shit.

FTC sues Intuit for false advertising, says 'free' TurboTax isn't always free

FrankAlphaXII
Happy

About time

I'm in one of the class actions against them over this very same thing, and they're being incredibly difficult, I had to basically give a deposition to their legal counsel stating the same thing over and over, that there was no way to actually file the 1040 for free, especially if you filed Earned Income Credit paperwork too, and just about everyone working who has a child in the United States is filing for that credit. Glad the FTCs suing them too. They deserve it completely.

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Watson

He was also an Afghan war veteran, from the second time the UK Government and British Army thought it was a good idea to try to fight there. He got wounded at Maiwand, which is fairly close to Lashkargah nowadays, there's a highway that runs from Kandahar to Lashkargah that passes right through it. One of the many highways and roads in that country that I've been shot at on myself.

Watson was no fool, he was tough as nails, intelligent, a good shot, flexible and mentally agile enough that he could put up with weirdness out of Holmes, and was a very good physician

French tech giant Atos issues second profit warning in 7 months

FrankAlphaXII
Unhappy

Unfortunate

That honestly kind of sucks. I work for a rather large notebook, desktop and workstation OEM doing hardware break/fix, and a lot of the larger businesses that have the expensive contracts with us use Atos as their client support vendor. Compared to the other big ones like Capgemini, DXC, Deloitte, and Infosys, I actually like talking to the Atos techs, they're usually pleasant, professional, well spoken even if English isn't their native language, and do most troubleshooting before calling us, and they're almost always willing to do whatever (even if it sounds pointless) to get their end users up and running again. They don't generally push back except for things that I agree are clearly very unlikely and/or stupid or have already been answered in whatever process flow.

I've been in this business long enough that I know what'll probably happen here, they'll start cutting employees and compensation, people will start leaving and they'll wind up being like most of DXC (pissed off all the time and very clearly unhappy with their jobs) within a year or two. I wish this wasn't as predictable as it is.

CentOS Stream 9: Understanding the new Red Hat OS release for non-Red-Hat-type people

FrankAlphaXII

Re: No-one sane runs Streams in any business use

Yeah, Amazon does exactly that. It's Linux for AWS is based on Fedora, and they've never said what sub-version but I suspect that its rawhide (don't quote me on that, but if you're going to do things in an insane manner, why hold back? Might as well go full batshit).

That's kind of what's always stopped me from using AWS except as a backup, production stuff on very unstable code is a recipe for things like last week.

BadgerDAO DeFi defunded as hackers apparently nab millions in crypto tokens

FrankAlphaXII

Self-awareness in naming

Spiral? How appropriate.

Graveyard Spiral

IBM researcher suing for age discrimination blames CEO Arvind Krishna for his ousting

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Who wants to work for IBM?

If you treat people like they're mercenaries, as most businesses do with contractors or whatever the MBAese for people who are doing work a regular employee would do for less money and no benefits is now (I've heard Contingent Worker, External Solutions Provider, etc), don't be surprised one bit when they don't have loyalty whatsoever and leave for greener pastures or a permanent position with a competitor when they get offered one. Its the nature of the beast, by design, and there are alternatives.

As System76 starts work on its own Linux desktop world, GNOME guy opens blog, engages flame mode

FrankAlphaXII

I use KDE or MATE when I'm using something UNIXy, so I don't really have a dog in this fight, so maybe I'm wrong but I will say it sure as hell seems like every time someone has an issue with a desktop environment the common denominator is almost always GNOME or its developers not listening to their users.

If your apps or gadgets break down on Sunday, this may be why: Gpsd bug to roll back clocks to 2002

FrankAlphaXII
Meh

Something's gotta give

We really need to start treating critical software infrastructure like we do for things like transportation and fuel, food supply chains, medical supply chains, etc.

As an emergency preparedness and response professional with an IT background, it is woefully inadequate and quite potentially a major hazard that libraries and small infrastructure projects like this hinge on a developer or developers who are volunteering their time and effort with no continuity planning, funding, time or means to respond to a bug or vulnerability because nobody wants to do it. Not everyone has a Google, IBM-hat, HPE/HPI, or Microsoft in their corner giving them time to do this utterly thankless, time consuming, but absolutely critical work to make sure that things will work further up the stack.

It's not flashy, on a resume most employers will give it a glance and even if they know what it is this person does and just how important it is, it rates a little above "that's nice" unless they're "concerned it may impact your productivity". It's a damned shame and I wonder how much chaos, insanity and murder is going to have to occur to get people and business to actually give a shit.

It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant

FrankAlphaXII

Re: A pain in the rear end

Yeah, after my Pixel 2 finally died I wound up saddled with a Samsung and the fingerprint sensor really sucks. I cannot wait to get a Pixel 5a or 6 just to not have to deal with this damned thing's sensor that works maybe 1 time out of 15 attempts. It reminds me of the blood vessel geometry scanners on some SCIF doors that always fucked up when I was in the Army. Or the hellspawn that was our USB fingerprint readers we had to use to biometrically authenticate with if for some reason we weren't using our CAC readers (or if, surprise surprise, the damned Smartcard readers or their firmware broke)

We use PingID where I work now and before I log in I usually have the phone unlocked so I don't have to screw around with the Biometric nonsense since it hardly ever works.

The more things change and all.

The unit of measure for fatbergs is not hippopotami, even if the operator of an Australian sewer says so

FrankAlphaXII

Thinking about Reg Standard units makes me miss some things about classic El Reg

I've been here a long time (I'm usually more active when I'm bored, was deployed, or was unemployed after getting out of the Army. You can always tell when I'm fucking off or I'm not working actively as I'll usually wind up with a Silver Badge before too long until a new project starts), but this got me to thinking about some of the crazier shit that this publication's done in my time here, like Boatnotes, all the stories about Rockall, the Playmobil reenactment articles, FoTW, the Standards converter, etc.

Which makes me miss Lester even more than usual because if I'm not mistaken all of those were his brainchild.

We need more insanity and chaos around here. Just my two cents.

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

FrankAlphaXII

Re: ‘Rocky’, eh?

The Multinationals are a hell of a lot more effective than that damned Coyote is, they're more like how actual Coyotes are: they watch and wait until there's a visible weakness and then strike or they keep testing defenses and shifting their internal organization (and leadership) around until they find a hole or an optimum way of attacking the existing defenses that works for them.

Then again, the Roadrunner's a decent representation of open source, but if I've gotta pick a Southwestern desert, scrubland or steppe animal to represent it, I'd probably pick the Tarantula Hawk because while they're largely docile if they decide to attack the adversary may win, but it'll likely regret it.

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

FrankAlphaXII

Surely this is a joke, but its not

What year is it? And hell, I thought it was an April Fool's article myself until I double checked the date.

Its funny, one of the first articles I ever read on El Reg was on SCO vs The World.

Its the same stupid song and dance that's been going on for 20 something years now. And pretty much nothing's changed since the last time they tried this except that Zombie SCO has another new name, this is like their third or fourth one. Same tired bullshit claims. And again, just like last I pointed out last time, its funny (and telling) that they're not suing other commercial UNIX vendors like HPE for HP-UX or Oracle for Solaris.

A definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that definition, Zombie SCO is clearly insane.

Delayed, overbudget and broken. Of course Microsoft's finest would be found in NASA's Orion

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Windows for Spaceships ?

I find your lack of knowledge disturbing.

Do some research. You'll find there's very little of the Toy OS variety involved with anything important in Spaceflight. No Linux, No Windows, no macOS. Its mostly (like nearly all) purpose built RTOS like VxWorks.

The unanswered question at CentOS community Q&A: How can we trust you now?

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Problem

They're not saying this, but the way I'm looking at it is that Fedora Server fills that traditional role that an alpha did back when the software lifecycle made sense, and that CentOS Stream fills the beta role. They're both nothing anyone with sense is ever going to use in production.

IBMhat thinks that they're going to drive people purchasing RHEL by doing this, but its going to alienate people who were using CentOS as a relatively stable environment to try to push people to buy RHEL by showing how well it worked

FrankAlphaXII

Re: Are people sure they get what Stream is?

Its not just uncomfortable, its a downright insane place for a production environment. No one who values their clients or their job is going to use it in production because its only a matter of time that some untested piece of beta software breaks something very important.

Fundamentally, CentOS stream is a beta where Fedora is an Alpha. It is never a good idea to use beta software in production anywhere outside of a UAT environment with power users, QA testers and developers that know they're testing something and that it might break. That's different from an unsuspecting client who expects the software they're using in production is stable and probably won't unexpectedly break just because the vendor pushed out something that broke a mission critical piece of software.

Devuan adds third init option in sixth birthday release

FrankAlphaXII

Re: PulseAudio?

I certainly hope so, not being quite a "desktop" audio user but not quite a "pro" because of a musical background where there's certain things that I do a certain way for a specific reason that fall into the cracks of recognized use cases, I've been stuck with Windows and macOS with no real alternative because PulseAudio is flaky (and mind you, I don't mind systemd, it has its advantages and disadvantages like any other piece of software) and JACK is well, itself. In theory I should be able to use it like an expert, in practice its hit and miss.

The thing is, I don't always work in Windows or macOS so hopefully the Fedora folks get it right and it gets adopted outside of Red Hat World (and even Linux land because if I'm using a UNIXlike its most likely FreeBSD or GhostBSD), though if I'm using Linux its most likely a Red Hat-esq distribution.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

FrankAlphaXII

Re: So?

You forgot number 4. Sell chunks of the business to Lenovo.

Intel is over GPUs and CPUs – it's all about 'XPUs' now that OneAPI code-abstraction tool is golden

FrankAlphaXII
Devil

Re: Bye?

I'm not enough of a bastard to want to inflict my ex on anyone else. I'm slightly mean, but I'm not sadistic.

'20,000-plus staff' could face the chop in spin-off of IBM's IT outsourcing biz, says Wall Street analyst

FrankAlphaXII
Trollface

I vote for literature, hear me out.

His statements wishing death to Nvidia's engineers in multiple ways, that OpenBSD developers are a bunch of masturbating monkeys, that userspace was written by other monkeys smoking crack rock, and that a certain compiler's behavior is similar to a sloth that was a victim of a drop on its head as an infant are true classics, and need recognition as such.

FrankAlphaXII

Re: In the long run

I'm sure Infosys, Collabera or Capgemini will be happy to hire him, with no benefits and a significant pay cut naturally.

Who cares what Apple's about to announce? It owes us a macOS x86 virtual appliance for non-Mac computers

FrankAlphaXII
Meh

I've said this for years...

But if Apple were to start selling macOS by itself that is the single Apple product I would buy. And I'd pay a good deal for it too.

Its for-real SUS compliant UNIX with an outstanding graphics and window management subsystem and decent driver support for less than the thousands of dollars that whatever the SCO remnants currently call themselves, HPE, Oracle and IBM are going to gouge you for their OS and the hardware that runs it (in IBM, HPE, and Oracle's cases anyway).

While I'd love to use macOS, I have absolutely no desire to use Apple's overpriced hardware. I value function far over form and on Mac computers the form has been super-ceding the function for quite some time, but I would switch from Free and FuryBSD as my main UNIXlike in a heartbeat if Apple sold macOS by itself. Unfortunately the whole idea makes sense and would work, so it'll never happen.

Motorola Moto G 5G Plus: It won't blow your mind, but at £300 we're struggling to find much to grumble about

FrankAlphaXII

Since the Pixel 4a is taking damned near forever to get released, and I really need a new phone (the top 3rd of my Pixel 2's touchscreen isn't detecting inputs and my mic decided it doesn't want to work anymore), this is what I'm looking at, mostly because of it having stock Android, 5G, and not costing a thousand dollars.

The only thing that makes me hesitant is that it's a Lenovo product as I have some issues with them after a suspicious experience on a notebook a few years ago, but I may well give this phone a shot unless Google gets the 4a out within the next month or so.

An unfortunate bit of product placement for Microsoft as Liverpool celebrates winning some silverware

FrankAlphaXII

Re: I thought Bork meant "break"

Well if a company the size of BT can't figure out how to activate Windows, its kind of a bork, more of the beancounter variety though

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

FrankAlphaXII
Meh

Yep, because words matter so much when you're trying to simply survive

My question is just how much money and time (same thing, especially in the Bay and in Seattle) is being wasted on something as stupid as PCness in technical terminology.

Yet again, the slacktivist keyboard warrior crowd tilts at windmills related to language instead of the hard thing, actually doing something about inequality in the real world. This shit pisses me off because its a fucking side show designed to make people who are fucking the entire goddamned world over by doing what they do feel better, that they're "doing their part" because their one black "friend", y'know the Contingent Worker at the security desk at Orwell Worldwide LLC or their parent MammonTech Inc told them that changing names of something they do not know or care about and has precisely zero impact on their lives would make them feel so much better and make the world a better place.

Its better to do something like this instead of, y'know, something involving some risk, non-monetized expenditure of time and effort, potential discomfort and arrest, like making sure their "friend" at the security desk with G4S or Securitas or the cafe with Sodexo that's working 33 hours a week (so they don't have to pay for benefits while paying them minimum wage on top of it) might be getting a living wage and can afford to pay for rent and bills AND food, instead of having to pick which is more important and which can get put off, or having access to a decent educational system, living in neighborhoods safe from gangbanging thugs that drive black and white vehicles that might just kill you and get away with it (and also the criminals too), being able to afford to maintain a healthy lifestyle, having relatively clean water, being able to have an illness where you miss four days of work or can afford to take time off to do something besides work for once, or something as small as having access to basic healthcare to prevent serious illness of course.

Because that would be fair, and fairness isn't just wrong, its communist! Can't have that of course.

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