Posts by eldakka

Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks

> We need anti-trust legislation with teeth.

There are 32 teeth, so each month the regulator should be prompted with a list of 32 teeth and has to pick the one it wants to use that month.

Re: re: Chromium based

> And there's no way you can verify that Firefox itself isn't using DOH behind the scenes.

There is, a MITM proxy.

All devices are blocked from accessing the internet, they must connect to a proxy and only the proxy IP is allowed through. Set the proxy up as a MITM proxy, and you get to see all traffic.

Scientists spot startlingly close black holes in Hyades star cluster

Re: The Asylum has shown the way

> The gravity of the situation

Ba-dum tish?

IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?

Re: qualities HR doesn't like

> if the qualifications list has a typo that requires experience with fireballs,

aha! I knew my PnP DnD skills would come in useful oneday!

I have a lot of experience with fireballs - both on the receiving and delivering end.

> there is one process that education isn't designed to teach explicitly, and I'm not sure how it can, called thinking.

That is what university/college is for.

Primary Schooling and Secondary Schooling (the hint is in the name, 'schooling' and 'primary' and 'secondary') are intended to 'school' one in the general things someone needs to be a productive member of society, how to live and function day-to-day in a post-serf/peasant world, the world that has existed since the industrial revolution.

University has historically been where one goes to actually learn to think independently. This is why universities are hotbeds for unrest compared to the general populace because of teaching you to actually think - which more restrictive countries (dictatorships, one-party states, etc.) try to clamp down on as this 'free thinking' inevitably leads the students to understand the - and want to change - how the country actually works - it expands their horizons. This is why - until the last two or three decades at least - where for many jobs the mere fact you have a degree, irrespective in what it is in, can be a pre-requisite for getting a job. The fact someone has a degree has historically meant they know how to think, how to conduct research, etc. Various civil-services of many countries have desired a degree - any degree - for employment precisely because of this. This cachet has lost some of its power however as non-university tertiary institutions who taught post-secondary school vocational courses (e.g. trade schools for electricians, plumbers, draftsmen, etc.) have all become universities but still teaching those same vocational courses with the name changed to a 'degree' rather than being a diploma as they used to be, leading to a proliferation of universites that teah many courses that don't fulfill the historic unviersity ideal.

> I think for the vast majority of people these things are completely useless.

Right, but that's the problem of education though, how do you know what will and will not be necessary for these individuals?

You can't - to do otherwise would be a totalitarian class/caste-based or slave-like society where the government decides what niche you are going to fill when you are 7 years old (e.g. Spartans, you are a 7yo male, off to warrior school for you).

That's why the 'earlier' in the education stack you are, the more general and wide-based the education, so it oesn't matter which direction you head you've got underlying foundations for it.

When you are are year 8 (2nd form), the teachers don't know whether you are going to go and do a Maths degree, or compsi, chemistry, physics, history, medicine or a trade (electrician, cabinet-maker), so you are taught foundational skills across a broad variety of disciplines, 90% of which you'll never need again, but the 10% of what you are taught that you do need will be in the 90% of NOT needed to know for 90% of the other people - but at this point in development it's not known which path you need to know most about.

As you advance to higher levels of learning, you become more and more specialised, so in year 11 (5th form) you may have decided you are going to study history in university, so you can avoid the advanced-maths or physics classes, etc.

Oracle Cloud, Netsuite, and Azure go down, hard, Down Under

The Big Red Cloud first advised customers of an outage at 2129 Sydney time (1229 UTC) on Wednesday, and 29 minutes later wrote to inform customers that the outage had started earlier than its first emailed advisory – at 1015 UTC.

Oracle’s second email delivered the mixed message that: “We are still investigating an issue in the Australia East (Sydney) region that is impacting multiple OCI services. We have identified root cause of service failures and are working to mitigate the issue.”

Well, not for those who host their email in those data centres.

Middleweight champ MX Linux 23 delivers knockout punch

Re: Obsolete

> My computer doesn’t run an operating system anymore, now it runs a Proxmox hypervisor

You are aware, are you not, that a hypervisor is an operating system?

The user applications that a hypervisor runs are VMs running guest operating systems, rather than games or office apps.

MIT boffins build battery alternative out of cement, carbon black, water

Re: So what's stopping all that energy ...

> I think that the poster is referring to "ground bounce", and how many residential houses have lightening rods anyway?

Mine doesn't, it has a heavening rod.

Google's browser security plan slammed as dangerous, terrible, DRM for websites

Re: Scraping

And everything you just said comes under what I already said:

"I woldn't think the "as long as the data is legal" would need to be stated, e.g. copyrights, legality (kiddie porn, etc.)"

Re: Scraping

I can't speak for the OP you are replying to, but I think it is more like:

anything that is on the public internet, i.e. not hidden behind a login, is available to be scraped.

I woldn't think the "as long as the data is legal" would need to be stated, e.g. copyrights, legality (kiddie porn, etc.)

If you have stuff you want to protect, require a user to create an account and login.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Re: Rent seeking

That's why you rip the DVD to a file on your NAS so that crap can be pulled out and you are just left with a nice, clean video file to play via your media player to the TV's HDMI port.

Gah, that sounds like a lot of work, which is why I skip the ripping step and just download the video (after buying the DVD or having a subscription to the streaming service) straight to by NAS for playback, someone else has done all the work of ripping and culling the crap out of it (usually).

SpaceX says, sure, Starship blew up but you can forget about the rest of that lawsuit

Re: Late stage capitalism

I'm not an expert, I can only speculate.

But, for example, Facebook was forced to go public in 2012 (citation in article goes to Felix Salmon) because it had passed a threshold of 500 investors.

In that cited article there is mention of volume of trading shares as well.

I suspect that share options given to employees don't count as 'investors' for that 500 investor limit, but I am only speculating.

That article you referenced did note (various quotes):

• But to keep tight control of the company's shareholders, SpaceX uses an internal stock market, according to an investor. The private exchange matches up employee shareholders with approved investors.

...

...also gives SpaceX precise control over people who own pieces of the company.

...

But the anonymous investor said the company didn't let employees sell to anyone at any time: It uses an internal "matchmaking service" with vetted investors to get employees cash for their options.

...

Employees could try to sell their shares on their own, such as through a broker. But because SpaceX is not a public company, and its shares come with a right of first refusal, the company's board of directors can kill a private sale.

...

Such comments underscore another incentive for sticking with SpaceX: Even if an employee quits with a nest egg of vested shares, they can't really do anything with them — at least legally — until SpaceX either buys them back or the company goes public, which may not happen for decades.

...

Once SpaceX has a handle on which employees are selling what, they approach investors — but only trusted parties already in the company's capitalization table, or cap table.

...

"They get people like me who are previous investors, which doesn't change the cap table," the investor said. "From a company perspective, they don't want their guys leaving and trying to sell the stock to other players. They want to control that process. It's very smart. SpaceX kind of controls the market."

...

All of which leads me to believe that employee options aren't regarded as 'investors', that SpaceX can and does legally control to whom and when and how many of those shares obtained via share options are sold to, and keeps a 'cap table' of allowed investors so that it can ensure it doesn't exceed whatever the limits are before one is forced to be listed on a stock exchange (whether that's 200, or 500 investors, or specific share trading volume).

Re: Late stage capitalism

> And by shareholders, you must mean Elon Musk. SpaceX is a privately held company.

A private company does not mean no shareholders. It means the number of shareholders it has is below the threshold that legally requires listing on the appropriate stock exchange. That number varies by country, but I think in the US it is around 200.

Re: Read the fine print!!

> ou can also access the beach from above by getting onto a SpaceX rocket

You can access it from above without quite going to the extreme of a rocket, such as with the use of a helicopter.

Fedora Project mulls 'privacy preserving' usage telemetry

Right, so they do indeed collect it, they have to, it's the way TCP/IP (and UDP) work, it has the source address attached to the packet header, therefore they have to collect it initially before implementing some other process to strip it out.

It'll be interesting to see if their unsubstantiated claim that they don't store the received IP addresses is sufficient under GDPR to ignore the opt-in requirement.

TSA wants to expand facial recognition to hundreds of airports within next decade

"It identifies those four very key and critical elements in identity verification, which are the lynch pin for transportation security," Langston said.

How many security incidents have occured in the last two decades that such a system would have prevented?

Data leak at major law firm sets Australia's government and elites scrambling

Re: Did Someone Mention "Rules"?

> [some spiel about D/H and communications encryption]

That's all well and good when talking about communications encryption, but what has any of that got to do with the @Flocke Kroes post you are replying to that is about at-rest data?

If the police decide that a file on your computer is encrypted they can put you in prison until you do decrypt it.

e.g. if you have a computer with an encrypted HDD/SSD that requires a login to un-encrypt it, if you don't provide the appropriate login/password details to unencrypt that HDD/SSD then in the UK (and I think Australia too?) you will have committed a criminal offence and/or contempt of court by not handing over those details, and can be held until you do so.

Family-owned aerospace biz throws a wrench in Boeing IP lawsuit

> At Big ass companies, the beancounters usually are expensive lawyers.

Fixed that spelling mistake for you.

US Senators take Meta to task for releasing LLaMA AI model after token safety checks

> The duo said LLaMA appears to be less restrained and generates more toxic and harmful content than other large language models.

Sounds a lot like Facebook ...

Microsoft Windows latest: Cortana app out, adverts in

> You sound like a smoker promising to give up every time the price of packet goes up :-)

I note the smiley face at the end of that sentence, but still want to point out that is a bad analogy.

Going out buying smokes is an active err, action, that requires continuosly going and buying the smokes, and continously paying the money. Smoking costs money and effort on a daily basis.

Staying on windows 10 is entirely passive. I haven't spent a $ on windows in over a decade, win 7 -> 8.1 -> 10 upgrade path all using the same license¹. I've been running win10 for many years now, it'd take actual effort to change, but takes no effort to stay on windows 10. That's the only reason I am still on windows 10, it'd take more effort to move off it than it takes to stay on it.

A better analogy would be staying in a job you don't like. Can you find a job with better pay? Can you find one at all? Maybe just put up with it until something better comes along rather than being proactive and quitting and getting a new job ...

However, when it does come time for getting off windows 10, it'd be comparable effort to go to win 11 or Linux, therefore that's when the choice will be made (with my level of laziness), not 'now'.

And a note to those who'll diss Linux, saying its hard to move to and I never will move to Linux because it's too hard, I'll just note that I moved from Linux to Windows, I used a Linux desktop at home from the mid 90's (pre 1.0 linux) until around 2000, when I went to Win2kpro for home desktop usage. I currently use Linux at work (and was a Solaris sysadmin for a decade before that), I have Linux computers at home for server usage, just not daily-driver desktop. I'm quite familiar with Linux. I'm just too lazy to move at home when 80% of my home desktop computer usage is gaming, it's just less friction to stay on windows when the primary usage is games. The question comes down to if the friction to stay on windows is greater then the friction to overcome my laziness to move, or whether the friction to move from win10 -> 11 when the time comes is enough to overcome the friction of win10 -> Linux.

And that's the point of my original post, Microsoft is increasing that friction to go from win10 -> 11, such that it's looking likely to be greater than the friction of going to Linux, at least for me.

-------------------

1. OK, not entirely 100% true, I've purchased 3 laptops in that same time, and they came with pre-installed windows and license with each of those laptops, and despite the cost not being broken out as a separate line item in the receiprt, the cost is built into the price you pay. However those have not been my daily-driver at home desktops, and I've never upgraded the O/S on them, they've each lasted as long as the pre-installed O/S was supported for.

> The most click-happy person I can think of buys maybe 2 or 3 items a year directly from an ad on Facebook or similar

Even if I do see an ad (rare as I use ad blockers) that advertises something I am interested in, I make a point of not clicking on the ad and open an entirely different browser (e.g. if I see the ad in firefox I'll open vivaldi, chrome or even edge) and go directly to the site in a private window in that other browser, not clicking on any ads at all.

Every month it seems there is a new 'feature' MS is putting into Win11 that is pushing me more and more to making my current Win10 desktop my last Windows-based primary desktop O/S. I might have to have VM Win11 or even dual boot for limited specific purposes, but it won't be my 'daily driver' O/S.

Australian cyber-op attacked ISIL with the terrifying power of Rickrolling

Re: the terrifying power of Rick Astley.

> I thought that was banned under the Geneva Conventions?

It is -see the section on torture.

But the Geneva Conventions only apply between soverign states, it does not apply to things like rebellions, civil wars, insurgencies. I think ISIL is regarded as an insurgency, not a soverign nation, therefore the Geneva Conventions do not apply.

Atlassian says 'Don't #@!% the Planet' so it can keep making money

Re: "Especially"?

> Surely it's "even though"?

Commuting to and from work for a normal onsite employee is not 'staff travel', as it occurs outside employment activities, therefore imposes no direct costs on the business. Getting to and from the initial location of carrying out work is a private expense of the employee, if you start work at 9am at the office and work there until 5pm, it is a private expense, a part of expectation of employment, that the employee get themselves there on their own time and at their own expense. However, if during that 9-5 window the employer changes the location of work, such that you have to travel to a second location (and then possibly back to the first location), that cost must be covered by the employer - whether re-imbursement of a taxi ride or a fuel allowance or a direct payment such as with a corporate credit card - thus it is 'staff travel'.

e.g. I'm at the office doing work at 10am, then a meeting is called for 2pm that is to occur in an office that's 20 minutes drive away, therefore as part of work I have to travel between 2 different work locations. So I take a taxi to the location of the meeting and put it on the corporate credit card. Then after the meeting I go back to the office where I started my day, and again place that taxi fare on the corporate credit card. The business has picked up those travel costs.

But mostly in-person work meetings occur within offices in the same building or immediately adjacent buildings which are a few minutes walk, therefore don't incur what would be a staff travel expense (whether re-imbursable or covered up-front by the business). However, if people are typically or often working at home, then many in-person meeting requirement would now be travelling for work purposes that would be an expense to the business, that is, during a single work cycle, you will be working from multiple places - start work at home, then at 11am travelling to another work location for work purposes - to attend that in-person meeting - then potentially travelling back to your other place of work, home, incurring yet another business expense.

edit: So many typo's.

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

Except for giant space-mice.

Re: Rogozin isn't well

> What, you think he should avoid staircases or windows, which do seem to be problematic for critics of the current regime!

staircases, windows, hospitals, international holidays with the family, domestic holidays with family, ropes (suicide by hanging), walking the street, cliffs, guns (suicide by gunshot), bodies of water, cigarettes, ... Wikipedia list of suspicious Russian deaths.

TBH, picking up a rifle and joining the frontlines in Ukraine (on either side) is probably the safest place to be.

^^^

Here, I've supplied the appropriate icon for you ->

;)

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

Re: Thunderbirds are Go!

> Well I think it looked like a giant cock.

Sure, if your cock is 1cm in diameter and 13cm long, in which case you have a very weird cock.

No, the cockiest rocket I've ever seen is Blue Origin's New Shephard.

Military helicopter crash blamed on failure to apply software patch

Re: The Capital?

> Because the Australian Capital Territory needed to have a coast line (for some reason)

The 'some reason' was for a port. Don't forget this was 1915, when airplanes were still mostly a curiosity, and well before they became a significant civilian transport option. In those days, shipping still ruled inter-continental passenger transport. Therefore it was important that the capital territory had access to its own seaport, at least in the eyes of people at the time. Things have changed since then of course, as most passenger travel is via airplane, and as Canberra never developed into an industrial hub it's not like it needed large amounts of its own shipping capability, what was necessary was easier provided through existing terminals in Melbourne and Sydney, especially after road transport became a thing and decent highways were built inland.

Why Microsoft is really abandoning evaporative coolers at its Phoenix DCs

Re: Phoenix

> Don't tell me you are one of those weirdos that insists on wearing clothes for some reason.

it's not so much me insisting on wearing clothes, it's the people around me insisting I wear clothes for some reason.

Turns out people don't like it when they suspect a machine's talking to them

Re: Bing Knows

> It turned out the actual results are severely weighted to the top end of the scale and anything lower than 8 was "bad". It seems this sort or scale and metric is fairly normal in the US and highly unusual in most other English speaking countries.

I run into this problem all the time when doing 'star ratings' for a service I've just received.

For example, on one of the rare times I used uber (like once every 2 or 3 years), after the trip I was given a chance (required?) to provide a rating of the service, from memory it was 1-5 stars.

Thinking that the trip was perfectly adequate - I never felt like I was going to die or get in an accident, the driver was polite and got me to my destination in a reasonable time - I gave it 3 stars, which to me seems the rating to give for an "everything went as expected, it was totally fine" response. But as soon as I selected 3-stars, the app then popped up a "please detail what went wrong with your trip"-type box. I was taken aback, as nothing went 'wrong', it was a perfectly average, accepatable, service. I went back and selected 4-stars, at which point it didn't prompt me for an explanation.

To me, this is totally weird. On a scale pf 1-5, to me, 3 is perfectly adequate, the expected (typical/average) level of service. 4-stars is 'superior' service, e.g., it was raining and the driver got out to escort me with an umbrella and put my bags in the boot in the rain so I didn't have to stand in the rain doing it. 5-stars would be truely exceptional service, like I got in and said "follow that car!" and the driver stuck to the other car like glue, didn't lose it despite dodging through traffic and hails of gunfire from the pursued car. Or maybe I got a blowjob during the trip (which didn't unduly delay me) would merit 5-stars, but certainly not a "got me there in one piece wihout undue delays".

President Biden kind of mostly bans commercial spyware from US govt

Confrmation that the US has in-house developed superior spyware?

"policy of the United States Government that it shall not make operational use of commercial spyware that poses significant counterintelligence or security risks to the United States Government or significant risks of improper use by a foreign government or foreign person."

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

Re: Let's see how strong Arm's ARM is... Will they have much power to strong arm?

I did think that was where you were going, but since the name 'StrongARM' wasn't used but space-separated words, I wasn't sure whether you were alluding to StrongARM or came up with something strikingly similar - but nit identitcal 0 yourself, my bad.

Re: Let's see how strong Arm's ARM is... Will they have much power to strong arm?

You missed the opportunity to use StrongARM!

Microsoft freaks out users with Windows 11 warning: 'LSA protection is off'

And marketing.

And the entire C-suite.

Save $7 million on cloud by spending $600k on servers, says 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson

Re: it doesn't, it won't and it can't

> All installers are required to have a license and it requires 2 years working for a licensed security company before you can apply for a managers license to do the work yourself causing less competition.

How is this any different to electricians or plumbers having to undergo an apprenticeship and earn their 'ticket'?

Just because 100 years ago any bob, dick or harriet could connect their sewage line to the town fresh-water, or set a house on fire or take down the entire neighbourhoods electricity by self-installing electrical wiring doesn't mean that should still be the case and that demonstrated training and education in the subjet shouldn't be required to get a license to do that sort of work nowadays.

Data-wiring is in the same boat. At first anyone could lay data cable and cross connect it to an electical cable and fry themselves, or advertise they are professional data-cable installers and then run bundles of data in high-voltage electrical cabling ducts, but after a while the government decided it'd be a good idea if people display a modicum of knowledge/competence before being allowed to install it. Seems reasonable to me.

> but there's enough competition in the market

Competition? What competition? It's basically a duopoly - maybe 3 players at a stretch. AWS 34%, Azure 21%, Google 11%, Alibaba 5% and it just get's smaller from there. The 3 biggest players between them control 2/3rds of the market. 2 or 3 players is just as bad as a monopoly, as when 1 raises the prices, the others will raise theirs as well to just under the one who raised prices first, so that they are still cheaper than that early mover, but they've upped their prices nevertheless. It happens again and again in limited competition markets. Perfect example is AMD/Intel in CPUs and AMD/Nvidia in GPUs. Once AMD started to get market share they jacked up their CPU prices and GPU prices to be similar prices to the incumbent Intel and Nvidia so they can make the same margins as the incumbents. Once they were satisifed with theior market share gained with lower prices - lower margins and profits - they then jacked up prices to increasze margins and profits. I'm not picking on AMD, all corporations do this.

A new player in the market now would have to spend 10's of billions to build up enough infrastructure to seriously compete with the big 3. 'Cloud' is a huge negative income for years due to the large upfront costs to build out the capacity to be actually useful, something big business and government would be willing to shift workloads to. It was hard enough a few years ago when everyone jumped on the bandwagon to try to compete with AWS. But now these are all bigger - capacity-wise - than they were 5 years ago, so it'd be even more expensive to enter the market in any meaningful way to compete.

Think of the size of the workloads that big government departments or companies have, I'm talking social security agencies, tax agencies (HMRC, IRS, etc.), companies like Walmart or Boeing or GE. The compute resources they require in cloud infrastructure can't just be moved between providers willy-nilly. It's HUGE. Only one of the top three would have the available capacity for say a Walmart to pickup lock, stock and barrel and shift to a new cloud provider. Anyone else would take a year or 2 to build out the capacity to accept a Walmart or IRS migrating to them. It'd be even worse trying to insource it again, it'd take 5 years to build up a soverign compute capacity and and the skiiled staff to run it and do an actual migration.

No, in 5 or so years, when these big organisations have lost all inhouse enterprise IT expertise after having moved everything to the cloud, they'll be trapped, it'd either be impossible to move to another 'competitive' (i.e. smaller, limited capacity) provider, or too expensive (in corporate profit/loss cycles or government budget cycles) and time comsuming (in election cycles - that's the next governments problem!) to bring it back inhouse, the big 3 will jack up their prices knowing the big boys who they make their money from are, effectively, trapped.

I'm just waiting for about 5 or 6 years when all the cloud providers triple their prices - just after a significant swag of big business and government services have moved everything to cloud and can be held hostage because it's too hard to move back on prem.

Then I'll be able to laugh at all the CIOs and CFOs who thought 'cloud' was better than self-owned hardware.

Don't Be Evil, a gaggle of Googlers tell CEO Pichai amid mega layoffs

Re: "Don't be evil" is long forgotten

> Ah, the old "it's a private company" argument.

Why yes, I tend to find factual and legally correct (per court-set precedents) arguments persuasive.

> The thing is that the social media platforms are the new "public square"

And proveably factually wrong and and proveably legally invalid arguments as unpersuasive, no matter how much you believe them. Your belief in this legally disproven doctrine is factually irrelevant.

> Are you telling me you think it's actually just ay-oh-kayy for YouTube to censor a sitting MP who is delivering a speech in the House of Commons?

That is not what happened, at all, therefore your question is misleading in the "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" way.

Youtube is not censoring the MP, YouTube in no way intereferred with the MP giving that speech in parliament. It was broadcast live via Hansard question time, there is a transcript of the speech on Hansard, multiple sources picked it up and re-broadcast it. YouTube declined to allow (at that time) re-broadcast on its platform. Let me say that again, re-broadcast on YouTube's platform. It did not go into parliament and instruct the MP to stop talking. It did not prevent the live broadcast on the parliament CCTV system or 'question time' broadcast of that on services that usually broadcast question time. It did not interfere with other broadcasters/platforms re-broadcasting that speech. It merely refused to participate in re-broadcasting. That is not censorship.

> Seriously?

Very.

Re: "Don't be evil" is long forgotten

> so it should not be up to Google to censor his speech in the House of Commons, should it?

Google - in this case it's Youtube subsidary - is a private platform and gets to chose what and what not it carries on its platform. It is not a public platform thus has no obligation to carry any material on it.

Ex-Meta security staffer accuses Greece of spying on her phone

Re: PMSL

Paranoia - as well as being a dick - are pre-requisites for working in security.

OpenAI CEO warns that GPT-4 could be misused for nefarious purposes

Fraudulent Manipulation and Manipulative Fraud?

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

Re: But...

> I maintain equipment for a charity that doesn't have a full-time person to do it.

To me, that's a perfect use-case for cloud. Any organisation that doesn't have enough equipment that would warrant several full-time IT employees if it was on-prem anyway is a good fit for cloud. As long as they understand cloud. e.g. cloud doesn't automatically give you HA, backups, cross-site backups, multi-zone availability, multi-national availability zones. All of those are optional, paid-for extras. As long as they understand that and pay for those extras (backups for example) they are expecting, then go ahead.

> Yes, these can be done on-prem, but it took our IT team a good few months to get another test environment up and running. They are busy AF, we are busy AF. Company does not want to hire more people, so cloud might be the way to get around it.

Well, yes, but that seems to be a work-around for shitty management, not necessarily a good technical decision...

Re: The whole premise of this article is bullshit

> I guess you could spin down VMs during the night, or move everything to containers and kubernetes, but that's a really huge pain-in-the-ass,

Why's that a pain in the arse? You use the same technology as the cloud providers, run your own on-prem clouds - OpenStack or whatever - and you get that same effect. I mean, the cloud architecture, K8s, dynamic workloads, micro-services, etc., there's nothing wrong with that. Makes perfect sense (for appropriate workloads) whether it's on someone else's cloud or your own.

> Also, what about patching the OS?

What about it? We patch OSes on thousands of servers automatically as it is now - after testing it to make sure it won't break current production systems.

> Patching firmware and routers?

We already do this on hundreds if not thousands of devices now.

> Negotiating deals with comms providers? Economies of scale?

My organisation has 20k employees, hundreds of millions of customers ranging from individuals to multi-nationals spread literally in every country in the world. We already have economies of scale and negotiate deals with comms providers. It's not that hard to negotiate deals with comms providers, if you have enough data flows that standard business plans don't cut it, then you are probably big enough to deal with that anyway.

> Once you've got a budget approved it could take many months to get all the hardware ordered, racked, provisioned and then get the OS installed and the applications put on top of that. With cloud you can get all that on the same day.

Right, and while you wait for those millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware, you can begin your 2 or 3 year RnD process - and PoCs - in the cloud, and once finshed there move it onto the on-prem hardware. I mean, a project that requires millions of dollars of hardware usually has some RnD lead time - do that in the cloud.

> If your company decides to change direction you can shelve a project after 6 months and just stop paying.

Since the hardware has already been paid for, there isn't any ongoing payment that needs to be stopped. You just stop using the equipment, and shut it down if you want to save electiricity. And I'm sure that hardware can be re-tasked to the other project that was on a 6-month wait (though, as above, they should have been doing their RnD in the cloud while waiting, so shouldn't really have been waiting as they had stuff to go on with anyway and should have placed their orders well before they'd actually need that hardware since) but can now use this hardware instead and cancel the order they had placed for hardware.

> Likewise, if some campaign blows up and works out 10x better than expected, you can fairly easily spin up 10x on cloud.

Absolutely, and working on-prem doesn't preclude this, as if you use on-prem cloud architecture then moving workloads to cloud or back again once the campaign stabilises and you purchase the hardware to bring it on-prem after its temporary cloud residency is (relatively) easy as long as you planned that from the get-go (i.e. don't use cloud services that you don't have on-prem, if you use DB2 on-prem then use your own DB2 licenses in the cloud).

Also, sack your analysts, they aren't worth shit if that happens.

> Which is why it's growing so fast, compared to on-prem.

There are many reasons its gorwing fast, the biggest of which is it's the current C-suite buzzword, and we all know how the C-suite fad cycle works. It's aso great for short-term expenses shifting, so it can be used to make it look like a company is reducing it's IT overhead - thus gaining bonuses for the C-suite - then the C-suite can leave with their bonuses before the monthly Opex of cloud over a period of a few years exceeds what Capex of on-prem would have cost. The exact same reasons these companies who are making $10's billions in profit are panic sacking 10's of thousands of staff so they can look good to their shareholders and earn their bonuses rather than caring about the long-term future of their companies.

Also because it's perfeclty suited to startups and their unknown requirements (because they are startups) and so startups don't have to worry about dealing with physical infrastructure while they are still small - and still working out what the hell they are going to do.

It's great for RnD and PoCs before you commit to spending money on hardware.

IMO cloud is absolutely suited for any business (or other organisation) that doesn't have enough use of IT resources to justify having several full-time hardware/infrastructure IT people, e.g. DBA, network specialist, server iinfrastruture specialist, etc. If you can get by with one of your employees IT-nerd children helping out every now and then, then absolutely cloud is the way to go. And those types of small businesses still make up the most types of businesses.

Once you get to the size where - if it was on-prem - you'd have a dozen of so full-time IT staff to look after it, it's probably getting big enough that bringing it on-prem would probably start to look cheaper than cloud.

Re: Shakespearian question?

> You "Kind of" went off of Joni Mitchell after she "Kind of" went off of Spotify? It may not have been your intent but the implication is that while you can choose not to listen to her music because of her choices, she cannot exercise her right to withdraw from Spotify because of their choice.

Spot on. Or as I would put it "the hypocrisy is strong with this one".

The fact they don't see the irony in their own statement is rather telling.

By order of Canonical: Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default

Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

I know, replying to own post, but hit post too quickly (even accounting for the fact I did edit the above post to add the last paragraph).

I was also being facetious in saying "Unless, of course, some distributions have started to remove 'tar' ?", pointing out that if they only want Snap to be used - hence banning Flatpack from out of the box installations - then they could take it further and ban 'tar' as well, as some people still do distribute tarballs, therefore tar shouldn't be available out of the box either.

The point of distributions like Ubuntu is to make average-user desktop Linux easier to use as a windows replacement for the masses than more hardcore distributions like Arch, Gentoo, LFS, etc. If that is the point, banning OOTB other package managers is going against that purpose. One would thing that to make a user-friendly Linux, that they'd want to include all the major package management options as part of the OOTB experience.

Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

> * What keeps track of what it puts where?

It's a tarball extracted into it's own tree, you don't need to keep track of what it puts where, as everything supplied in the tarball is under (for example) /opt/firefox, and if for some reason you need to keep track of it, thats what environment variables are for (FIREFOX_HOME=/opt/firefox).

> * How do you keep track of what depends on it?

It's an end-user application, a browser, nothing should depend on it, and it if does, that's what environment variables are for (put /opt/firefox/bin in your PATH).

> * How do you know what it depends upon?

Mozilla wrote and compiled Firefox, if they don't know what it depends on how did they compile it? Everything it depends on (libraries etc.) should be in the tarball, with all dependencies relative to the executable ( ../lib for example),

> * How do you upgrade it if you don't know what it put, where?

It's a tarball, you untar it over the top of the previous tree, "cd /opt; tar -xvaf ~/firefox.tgz ", done.

> * How do you uninstall it?

rm -rf /opt/firefox

rm -rf ~/.firefox (if you want to delete userdata as well)

> * How do you keep it online and know where to find it, so a million client machines or instances can fetch it when they need it?

Not sure what you mean by this, as 'keeping it online' is having a place to download it from, wget https://mozilla.org/releases/firefox/latest/firefox.tgz ? (made up URL, but you get the idea)

Being a tarball doesn't disable autoupdate (if that's your thing), as the autoupdate can download the latest version tarball and extract it.

We are talking about Snap and Flatpak specifically here, which (as I understand it) are basically used for application-type distribution/packaging, which basically include all the dependencies inside the bundle anyway. If you're going to do that, why re-invent the wheel? Just use a tarball.

I'm not saying there is no use for package maangers. I'm responding to the OP who said that using Snap means Mozilla doesn't have to have a different package build process for each flavour of Ubuntu, I'm pointing out that that advantage isn't limited to Snap. Can use a completely inclusive tarball, or do what IBM does and write their own cross-platform package manager (IBM Installation Manager) that they then support one package system (IBM Installation Manager) across Linux, Windows, AIX, irrespective of distribution.

Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

> It's useful for certain things, such as allowing one Firefox package to run on all Ubuntu versions instead of rebuilding it for each version.

What's wrong with a tarball that includes all the dependencies? Unless, of course, some distributions have started to remove 'tar' ?