Posts by ptribble

UK Covid-19 Inquiry finds early pandemic surveillance was weeks out of date

Re: Scamdemic

With colossal global interventions Covid was about 10x worse than a bad flu year. Without those interventions it could easily have been an order of magnitude worse again.

UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost

So, the only things it's good at are things that could and should be eliminated entirely?

LibreOffice 25.8: Faster, leaner, and finally speaks PDF 2.0

Re: Still no usable database

I've seen Word documents turned into a heap of slop in Word. If you're handed files from a different person, or running a different version of Office, or a different version of Windows, then chaos can ensue. LibreOffice isn't necessarily going to give a perfect rendition, but I usually see it do a pretty good job.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

The idea that CDDL was chosen to be deliberately incompatible with GPL is simply untrue.

Sun had to persuade a long list of existing licence holders and intellectual property owners to agree in order to open-source Solaris. CDDL was the compromise that resulted. (It also had to be a per-file license, rather than a per-project license, as lots of files in Solaris/OpenSolaris/illumos have different licenses.)

We wouldn't have expected Linux to simply take the code for, say, ZFS, and simply recompile it. A cleanroom implementation of the format seemed more likely, and it's been a bit of a surprise that ZFSonLinux decided to import the existing source and create a porting layer.

Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress

Re: Sure, Linux could make a truly usable desktop system....

In my experience Windows became completely and totally unusable as a desktop system many years ago.

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

Sandy

We had an east coast datacenter in the path of Hurricane Sandy.

Manglement were quite keen to keep it running, as we had an important contract. (The "see inside" feature for books on a certain major online retailer was served from there, although it got relocated very shortly afterwards.)

We had enough diesel for about 24 hours. We sent extra staff over, so we had someone on his Harley riding around local gas stations, depots, whatever might have fuel trying to get more diesel to keep us going a bit longer. Not a drop. After a while the local law enforcement caught up with him and rather strongly suggested that the curfew that was in force ought to be obeyed. That service was offline for days.

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

Indicative of a better way?

If Copilot eliminates 26 minutes of work a day, another way of looking at the problem is to ask: was the work necessary in the first place?

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Upgrade to open source

Simply adds more ammunition for campaigns like End of 10

https://endof10.org/

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Re: Succes

Based on the ability of the office suites used by people who my other half exchanges documents with to read the ODF format (essentially, zero) I wouldn't be so sure about claiming success. Yes I've heard that in theory Office can read the things, but in practice all that happens is complaints about unreadable documents.

UK stats body snoozes legacy tech overhaul as Treasury tightens purse strings

Opportunities aplenty

"The migration of legacy services into the VMware-managed service in AWS"

Two errors in one. A major opportunity for cost savings, right there.

'Uber for nurses' exposes 86K+ medical records, PII in open S3 bucket for months

Was it written in a memory safe language?

We see a lot of fuss being made about rewriting all the world's software in a memory safe language but, as demonstrated here, human carelessness knows no bounds, so is it worth the bother?

Cloudflare's bot bouncer blocks weirdo browsers

Incompetent or evil?

As a niche browser user (Pale Moon) on a niche OS (illumos) I get hit by this.

The question really is whether this is deliberate censorship, or inability. If the latter, then the idea they can accurately identify traffic is called into question.

UK government's cloud strategy: Pay more, get less, blame vendor lock-in?

Wrong question

Why on earth is the government using *any* cloud provider? If you think about data sovereignty, it ought to be in-house. And any government project is way above the threshold at which cloud financials stop making sense.

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

What are the actual demographics?

One thing I was conscious of at FOSDEM was that while there are a lot of us of the (slightly) elderly persuasion, overall most attendees were quite a lot younger than myself.

I'm starting to suspect that the problem isn't really bringing in younger developers as such, it's bringing any developers at all into a mature project. So, over time, mature projects tend to stick with the same core of contributors, which naturally ages.

Rackspace is back with a seat on the OpenInfra Foundation board

Overly Complex, by the numbers?

For something that's not an especially large estate, requiring a "dedicated team comprising more than 150 OpenStack experts and 50-plus Kubernetes administrators" indicates a significant level of complexity. That tells me that deployment needs a team of dedicated trained experts, which tells me that the technology isn't suitable for deployment by the majority of organisations.

And also those staffing numbers tell me it's 3 times worse than Kubernetes. Gulp.

(If a disinterested partner contributes over 5 million lines of code then maybe, just maybe, the suite is far too big and bloated.)

Clock's ticking on PostgreSQL 12, but not everyone is ready to say goodbye

Upgrade barriers

About the only issue I had with PostgreSQL is the upgrade mechanism - across a major release, it's dump and restore, which involves downtime, and is a right pain.

Sure, there are ways to avoid it, but they're relatively advanced, and need to be set up before you start; they're not easy to retrofit.

If the project provided a built-in transparent upgrade path, I'm sure users would upgrade more readily.

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Applies to illumos too

You could pretty much replace FreeBSD with illumos and exactly the same applies - boring and invisible is good. Stability at both the system and interface level is paramount.

(As a big difference, illumos doesn't have any Sovereign Tech Funds backing it.)

Majority of Redis users considering alternatives after less permissive licensing move

Re: Failure to understand: Open Source

The GPL wouldn't make any difference - indeed, using the GPL is quite explicit that you cannot stop anyone charging for your software. (The only thing about the GPL is that you require modifications to be published, but even that doesn't apply to services hence AGPL.)

Study backer: Catastrophic takes on Agile overemphasize new features

Many were. Many fell down.

Until fairly recently in human history much of engineering and architecture was of the try-it-and-see variety. There's massive survivorship bias because we only now get to see the ones that worked. Hopefully these fields have learnt the hard way what is necessary for success.

Amazon: Our cloud growth just sped up. Did you know we are also quite a big retailer?

"We've heard loud and clear from customers that they relish better price performance."

If price performance is a primary concern, don't use AWS then.

Linux updates with an undo function? Some distros have that

Re: Solaris boot environments?

Solaris (and thus illumos) have had boot environments in their current form (ie, on ZFS with snapshots) for about 15 years or more. You can have as many as you like (within reason, and within the arbitrary limits of grub when that was the bootloader).

Before that, certainly in Solaris 8 through early version of Solaris 10, we had the equivalent of the 2-partition setup with Live Upgrade. Which did work, but was clumsy and inefficient compared to the fully integrated and instant snapshot environments we're used to now.

Privacy features lose their way in latest Firefox update

Fiddling while their market share burns

One thing that strikes me is that development effort seems to be aimed towards random fiddling, wasting time adding features users don't want or removing features that users like. Looks like some leadership required to bring back some concentration on their core competencies.

AI PCs might solve a real problem: The 'friction' that sees users ignore security

Back to front

This seems rather backwards - you don't want an end-user to download an email to their machine and only then scan it for malware - you want to block it well before it gets anywhere close to their mailbox. And you definitely don't want end-users making security decisions at all.

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

Catching up with Linux

So, they're taking the same path that Linux distributions like RHEL/Fedora and Suse have already taken - bumped the Microarchitecture level to x86-64-v2 or so.

(Yes, I know Windows doesn't think about hardware support in terms of Microarchitecture levels the same way, but that's what it effectively is.)

At least in the open source world you can jump to a different distribution, or build it yourself. Although the pressure to bump the required baseline is building across the board, as more and more applications start to require features like AVX.

Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

Whenever I see a claim that adding a given tools makes users of X, Y, Z more productive, all that tells me is that X, Y, and Z are in need of serious improvement.

In this case, it's not that Copilot is good; it's that Office 365, Teams, and Outlook are so poor.

IT suppliers hacked off with Uncle Sam's demands in aftermath of cyberattacks

Maybe, if they actually want to be such control freaks, governments should consider running services themselves?

Oracle quietly extends Solaris 11.4 support until 2037

Re: If you were "stuck" on Solaris 10...

It's "illumos". No capitals. Some of the team get quite picky.

But yes, illumos continues the "just works without randomly breaking stuff on a regular basis" philosophy. Like Solaris, sits quietly in the background doing its job without requiring an army of squirrels constantly caring for it. Binary compatibility with Solaris 10 is excellent.

Used for new and very cutting edge stuff, like Oxide and Helios.

(Some of us are still running illumos on sparc. Now that is a bit niche, I'll admit.)

AI is changing search, for better or for worse

Perhaps groping randomly through all the rubbish on the current web isn't the best - or even a good - way to find information.

Early on, there were a number of excellent sites that provided curated lists of quality content. While that model doesn't solve all the use cases for search, it did do a much better job of some of them.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

2024 will be the year of illumos on the desktop

Linux 6.6's in-kernel SMB networking server graduates

"OpenSolaris did the same back in 2007, and it's doing fin— Oh wait."

The in-kernel smb server is still present in illumos, and actively maintained.

The interesting part of that is not so much the SMB server part, but that the use of Windows SIDs is fully integrated into the OS and ZFS, so you can manage ownership and permissions for Windows users natively.

Cloud is here to stay, but customers are starting to question the cost

Many of us have been questioning the cost of cloud for 15 years or more. What exactly is new here?

Socket moves beyond JavaScript and Python and gets into Go

"Applications just use so many dependencies, it boggles the mind."

And yet rather than actually solve the problem, the industry seems happy to encourage ever deeper dependency trees and throw money at attempting to handle the inevitable fallout.

What happened to doing proper software engineering?

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

While Pale Moon was well behind the curve for a long time, it's recently seen some major improvements and now works well enough for the most part. Whether it can keep that up or fade away again remains to be seen.

But it's a constant game of whack-a-mole trying to handle all the new misfeatures that all the chromesites have implemented.

Re: Intriguing subject line, then oh look, based on Chrome. NEXT!

Um, Gemini maybe?

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

Re: I just checked eBay

People (and the article) seem to pick one specific item here and fixate on it. The reality is that cost and availability are just a couple of the many discouragements that SPARC support faces.

Re: And they were really good heaters..

Quite. A lot of the illumos on SPARC support was done on the handful of machines in my home office. They would never get turned on if it was a warm summer day, but came in quite useful in the middle of winter.

Will continue in another form

While SPARC will be removed from upstream, that isn't quite the end of illumos on SPARC. Tribblix will simply fork illumos and continue with it's illumos on SPARC distribution from what will then essentially be a static base. Makes life easier on both sides - illumos mainstream can evolve more aggressively, and those of us using unchanging SPARC hardware can evolve much more slowly.

Remember those holy tech wars we used to have? Heh, good times

I don't think the divergence has gone away, but I do see the emergence of Cults (the Cult of Cloud, the Cult of Containers, lots of Cargo Cults) where people live in an echo chamber and largely interact with other cult members who share the same views, and who believe that there isn't a world outside the cult. Which mirrors trends in society overall.

OpenStack Foundation backs 'virtualized containers', for security's sake

Moneymaking all the way down

Keep adding layers until there as many layers as vendors, and then everyone's happy!

Apart from actual users, who keep having exponentially increasing complexity foisted on them.

Take Kubernetes, and bish bash bosh, you've got Container Runtime

Not manageable yet?

So, if we have a new project that "aims to make containers manageable", is that an admission that they currently aren't?

SPARC will fly: Your cheat sheet for cocktail banter at Oracle's upcoming shindig

Re: Solaris - Is this another OpenOffice?

Opening up the Solaris source (again) would make life very ... interesting ... for illumos.

We've diverged quite a bit, and have enough changes of our own, to the point that pulling in changes would actually be quite difficult. Hardware support for current SPARC models would be good, but I'm not sure there's all that much else.

MongoDB quits Solaris, wants to work on an OS people actually use

Not terribly significant, of itself.

There are people using MongoDB on Solaris/illumos; they're likely using their distro packages or building it themselves. And by the sounds of it, not paying a support contract. So those users become invisible.

A bigger problem is the relentless "everyone's abandoning Solaris" message being spread, which will tend to be self-fulfilling.

Rowhammer RAM attack adapted to hit flash storage

Just verify

It's 2017, why do people still use filesystems that don't cryptographically verify the validity of the data read from disk?

Oracle's systems boss bails amid deafening silence over Solaris fate

Not the repo you're looking for

You can't read anything into the activity of the solaris-userland repo - that's just the holder for the external open-source projects they ship as part of the product. Activity there is largely driven by CVEs and releases of those external projects, and it may not be what they're using as the primary internal repo in any case.

But yes, Oracle's stewardship of a flagship product has hardly been encouraging. You want that stuff, there's always the illumos project.

Solaris, Java have vulns that let users run riot

It seems a little odd to call the CDE calendar server problem a Big Red boo-boo. That code comes from *way* back.

Besides, nobody competent would actually have that running. Although I suppose that leaves a fairly big opportunity.

The Java scores look scary, but the list and scores aren't terribly helpful. Apart from telling you not to run Java in the browser, which is a message people should have gotten many many times already.

Open-source world resurrects Oracle-free Solaris project OmniOS

There isn't a SPARC version of OmniOS specifically, but v9os is similar, and both DilOS and Tribblix have SPARC versions of their illumos distros, with some people trying to get OpenIndiana on SPARC working as well.

Dark times for OmniOS – an Oracle-free open-source Solaris project

Re: I never knew it existed.

There are a number of illumos distributions, of a range of styles and potential uses.

If you're all nostalgic, I maintain Tribblix, which has a rather retro feel to it.

Guru: Oracle's storage strategy is 'screwy'

They have a strategy? Really?

Oracle's storage offerings are even more limited than the article suggests - as far as I'm aware the 2500 series is no longer offered.

Equally damaging is the removal of the X4500/X4540 line, which didn't really have much competition. There's no direct attach storage either. This is particularly odd given how well such storage plays with ZFS.