Posts by cjcox

KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives

Belongs to man.

While the antichrist uses the number, 666 is man's number. So, this version of KDE could be more properly interpreted as the KDE Plasma of man.

Goodbye, Lunar Gateway: NASA ditches Moon station for Moon base

Late 60's early 70's risks.. vs. now

So, "thing" in space with pretty much zero protection. I think we greatly underestimate the uniqueness of not just our planet, but also it's overall positioning in the solar system. There are a ton of huge safeguards present that mathematics will say is pretty darn unique. So, not saying building a base is impossible, but it wouldn't take much of a circumstance to destroy it. So, high risk? Extreme.

Would be nice if we visited all the places on earth we haven't been to. And then maybe explore the oceans (deemed very risky and difficult as well, but maybe we learn a lot in the process).

Anyhow, anyone who has seen "tiny" things impacting on the Moon.... not good. And that's just the "seen" and obvious. And, not the "big things".

So, spending "infinite dollars" on something that could be extremely temporal? Wise? Just an observation. If we can't do the much "lesser things"?

Amazon tells FCC to bin SpaceX's million-satellite datacenter dream

Vetoed

POTUS now says that all orbiting refueling platforms must use good old clean petrol, unleaded petrol, so as to not pollute the solar system. By relation, this will also apply to the powering of any sort of orbiting structures, like datacenters. As a side note, an executive order has been made price capping beef prices sold in orbit and throughout the galaxy. Steak should be affordable no matter where you are. And beef tallow plentiful for flavorful fries.

CISA updated ransomware intel on 59 bugs last year without telling defenders

Stupid

Changing the publicly consumable source of info so that consumers can see the change and then.... blaming that as not being sufficient (????)

"We want fireworks, a person banging on our door and screaming loudly... just for us of course."

Ridiculous. The data is there, anyone can tap, tap it and then it's up to you what "fires" you want to start within your owned realms.

Microsoft finally sends TLS 1.0 and 1.1 to the cloud retirement home

How to take "your crappiness" and make it sound like genius

On the client side Microsoft's love of old crap and "forever" keeping it... and now, saying "something".... sigh....

Good to see.... but honestly, Microsoft has been in the trash bin due to this for a very very very very very very long time.

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

Re: Trademarks

You're wrong... and right. There's the "idea" of "how we think" laws should work, and there's reality. Reminds me of when Red Hat was young and everyone was distributing cheap CDs with "Red Hat Linux" on them. IMHO, according to "the law", if those entities had proper legal advice, they could have easily argued for the removal of the trademark from Red Hat, because Red Hat was not doing any due diligence to protect their trademark. Times Red Hat has long forgotten, and honestly doesn't want you know about.

Anyhow, there's a reason why patents seem to be near infinite in length. And it's no surprise patents and trademarks are the same department in the USA.

However, it is a "duh" moment against Operation Bluebird. That is, even a novice with little or no understanding knows that you can't just "take" a registered trademark because "you think" it has no value to the owner. There's a ton of these out there. Products that no longer exist.... give it a try. Try to use the forgotten names.... I dare you.

Anyway, maybe it's not so obvious, but anyone that has done a patent and trademark search already knows about all of this.

Operation Bluebird: I'm ignorant of law, therefore, everyone else must be too.

Sigh. Can't believe the lunacy on this one. "Oh, look a One Way sign, therefore I will go the other way."

The information is well known and accessible. This is worse than not understanding 101 class sorts of things. More like "sky is blue". Unbelievable.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Blather

Plenty of "reinventions" out there. And of course, they "come and go". Why?

So, we've got KDE which presents a Windows+ (emphasis on the plus) and we've got an MacOS-ish Gnome. They stay around because of the amount of dedication of those projects.

But, again, as mentioned, plenty of more radical ones out there.

In the "year of the Linux desktop", a radical UI change probably means longer deferral of the revolution (just saying).

IMHO, people want functionality and not radical UI changes. Concepts like right clicking for a context menu... I mean what do you replace that with? What is the more intuitive UI that everyone should be using instead?

I get the "the idea", but I think the desire for "better", isn't well thought out. With that said, as a long time KDE user, I do like the idea of better, from their perspective, which is not total reinvention (destruction?) of good UI concepts. But, they do lean Windows-ish vs MacOS-ish.

Windows 11 update leaves Blu-ray and TV apps stuttering

Offtopic, but recent updates to sql server broke a long standing used "hole"

Latest SQL Server update for us broke the hole that allowed a "service" to locally query SQL Server without auth. A hole for sure, so we had to fix by using a priv'd local id in the db, but... another "surprise". This might affect others as well.

Tariff threat plays havoc with US PC market, economy not helping

Lots to unpack

So, the majority of PCs bought are of the "big name" suppliers. 99% of which are "controlled" (read into that what you will) by Intel. Intel sucks.

So, first, why aren't people buying PCs? They are Intel based. They suck. Intel isn't doing anything to "fix" their reputation (really).

That is, who cares about tariffs? Not saying there aren't factors there, but the big reason isn't that.

Microsoft's "forced PC purchase" plan came at a very bad time. Forcing people to buy "that which sucks" when the value isn't there and in many cases, it's a step backwards.... this didn't help at all.

When change is forced, people are forced to make a decision. And often times, that decision is to "wait", because all roads lead to "suck" currently (or to, risk, for those eyeing the non-big player AMD options out there). Again, this without regard to tariff impacts.

Tariffs are an "easy blame".... but it's not really the root cause. Not even close.

Many only own PCs for gaming (some would say it's the only reason today to own one). GPU manufacturers, also based on "what they can get away with" have greatly inflated their pricing based on many factors, but this was even happening prior to the "AI" revolution, but the latter has only made it worse. If the GPU component value isn't there (and it isn't anymore), that too pushes people into the "just wait" queue. Again, tariffs are an "easy blame", but the GPU chip makers are fully to blame on this one. Has zero to do with tariffs.

Is "the greed" factor working out? Nvidia would say yes. AMD would say yes (but they don't mean it, it's bad folks, really bad).

Companies are taking the "hard line" against their customer base. At some point, maybe, a change will happen. Right now, Nvidia is flying high. AMD is "high" (that is, too euphoric to notice what's actually happening to them). Intel is being artificially bolstered by the USA (the "safe USA company of the future"), but is losing tech minds like crazy. It's a mess. And none of this has anything to do with tariffs.

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly decides to do hardly anything to break it up

Microsoft got the monopoly label.... what did we do there?

Just pointing out that "not doing anything" has historical precedence.

AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'

Ethics?

To me, this is an ethical issue, or just a "humanity" issue. If you love people and want to do what is right for people.... or do you love money.

I mention this because AWS has made many decisions based solely on the "love money" side of the fence.

The world in which we live.

Every question you ask, every comment you make, I'll be recording you

It's worse than this (a lot worse)

Most all (pretty much all) devices that are "smart" are listening to your every word (and have been for many years). That ingestion is now simply better and more exploited. And yes, they listen to everything. Everything.

Gridlocked: AI's power needs could short-circuit US infrastructure

Random thought, path to EVs in the USA?

Currently, in the vast majority of areas (if not all), the power in play in the USA can't handle everyone getting an EV and charging at the same time. Especially not fast charging. So, just a thought, if AI is pretty widespread and requires some huge infrastructure build out, even if is mostly dissipates (which I think it might, longer term), the "build out", may give EV proponents the power actually required for "everyone" to hook up and charge and EV at the same time.

Just thinking out loud.

One of the barriers to "everyone must buy an EV" is the fact that our power networks can't handle it (even though back when it was to be forced on free Americans, those in leadership were blind to that). So, maybe a (possibly) temporal AI power overshoot, could create the EV for everyone requirement infrastructure?? Should "the forced mandate" return (which is possible).

As RHEL clones hit version 10, Rocky and Alma chart diverging paths

RHEL 10 "Documentation"

Lots of missing things, despite being quite a large list of changes (removals of previously supported things). Red Hat appears to be giving up. Sigh.

So, had the displeasure of Ubuntu the other day, a non-enterprise distro. Word to the wise, if you chose Ubuntu realize that what it supports today, won't work at all tomorrow. That's not "enterprise". Way too many dependencies on things that are not controllable (in an enterprise way). Yes, it's hard to be an enterprise focused distro. Hard enough for Red Hat to apparently want to quit... and something Ubuntu never understood to begin with.

SLES? Even Suse is debating letting all things go. The Linux world is wanting each corporation to manage all components on their own. And guess what? They will fail (vast majority, if they try to stay with Linux).

Right now, I don't see anyone stepping in to try to hold things together in a way that makes corporate sense. And then, we wonder why so many companies seem to be running back to (again, a very non-enterprise) a company like Microsoft. And we also why there's so much frustration in the IT industry as a whole? We created FOSS, and we can destroy it. And for whatever reason, we seem to be trying really hard. I'm talking at the corporate level. Sure, as a hobby OS, if it works today great, if it doesn't tomorrow, I just wait for a fix.... ok, for a hobby, not ok for a corporate enterprise.

Managing all packages (the container approach) is where we're heading. And the folks that a truly knee deep into it will tell you they can't wait for their retirement from IT tomorrow. It's a lot of work. More work than most can imagine. Individual software developers are clueless and don't really care if their rapid changes that break everything force you to do more work, nor are they aware of the massive dependencies to software they didn't even think would ever integrate with theirs. It's the beauty of FOSS, but without any enterprise control at all, everything will spin at different rates causing companies to have to manage a huge matrix of "drivers" (that is, upstream driving them) and trying to test and keep everything "working". It will eventually drive you mad. Controls can be a very good thing. Long term supportability as well. If everything delivers change all at once all the time, that world makes Microsoft "look very good" (which, btw, aren't the kings of stability... but why give them the crown?).

We need enterprise Linux. I'm hoping that "the clones" can save us. Red Hat is giving up. I think Suse is too. Ubuntu/Debian never had a clue, so, nothing changes there.

As a very seasoned configuration administrator, integrator, quality assurance, systems engineer and systems administrator.... I'm prepping for "chaos world". It will be a pain. But I've got to do my best to keep things stable in the midst of the apparent "aging out" of the enterprise Linux greats. Hope you're prepared.

And Red Hat, you suck. Quitters.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

In a way, you want this to succeed, but, highly unlikely

An X Server without applications isn't much. Application developers are actively moving away from X Sure, in this state of transition, things like XWayland are hit pretty well, but I fear that down the road, XLibre will become desperate for client apps. The old days being... the old days.

Trump can bluster and bluff all he wants, but iPhone manufacturing isn't coming to the US

Lots of stuff, not just Apple

I think the idea is that in a "single term" you can bring back the industrial revolution from decades ago is false.

I think that diversifying supply chains and some "security" (high cost) items would a better focus. But, we'll see. Even if "focused", not sure if a single term does it.

Some of President Trump's strategies (even at his lightspeed pace) would be more realizable if "two back to back terms".

Anyway, it's a fun ride and do want to see if the President follows through on cutting my electric bill in half in his first year back. And, after his term, if we get the "polar opposite" (Democrat), no telling what will happen then. May need to redefine "fun".

India’s chipmaking ambitions hurt by Zoho’s no-go and Adani unease

All tech is not equal

Despite sounding like similar things, tech software -> tech hardware, it's more like if McDonald's (hamburgers) was trying to get into automobile manufacturing.

TikTok fined €530M after EU user data ends up on servers in China

China is your best friend

I'm sure this was a one time isolated incident.

AWS claims 50% of Azure workloads would jump ship if licensing costs allowed

AWS's new discovery

Microsoft is an unchecked monopoly. Who knew?

Why is someone mass-scanning Juniper and Palo Alto Networks products?

PA lately

Over the past several months (year+??), PA has had very very high severity vulnerabilities. Stay patched friends.

SUSE doubles down on AI and Multi-Linux Support to prove it's still in the game

S.u.S.E. customer for a long time

I don't think the mainframe was the beginning of SLES. But was early on. Scott Handy described the early days like this: IBM wanted a Linux distro on the mainframe. Red Hat came with papers and lawyers, S.u.S.E. dropped an install off.

Anyhow, SUSE was very very enterprise focused. While Red Hat was focused on hosting websites, SUSE went beyond with large scale (even on Intel side) and supporting concepts to ensure dynamic changes could be done without "reboot". They were also first to embrace offering a Xen install with SLES as the Dom0. This was laughed at by Red Hat at the time (telling the world it was a huge mistake), but later that same year, they quickly rushed out a "major" minor point release update to put Xen out there. But they also made the huge mistake of making that the "default". So, if you were running RHEL(AS) 4.5 using the default install, you were really running in Dom0 the entire time (you won't see too many of these out there anymore, so, perhaps embarrassment avoided, but for a bit, definitely made Red Hat look... well... stupid).

Still a big SUSE (openSUSE) user today. While they might not be as good as they were in the beginning, they are still a lot more enterprise focused than the competition.

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

From cool school, back to old school, or closed school.

Remote Desktop App, while like most of MS App Store, people avoided, actually tried to give you a one pane view into all your RDC connections.

Remote Desktop Connection, fits like many things into that that, "looks old", but unlike newer MS things, actually works... is now "the working way."

Windows App, which strives to be modern, is restricted and controlled, and thus, pretty much unusable.

This is why when somebody points me at "new and shiny" from Microsoft, I yawn. Today's MS "best" is tomorrow's trash.

MS making most of the FUD and lies they spread about Linux applications for years moot.

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

HP doesn't want our business.

I think we need to give them what they want.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Make money, or not?

Constantly creating new environments and/or conditions stands in the way of making money.

And, since it keeps everyone busy adapting to directives given outside of the company, it usually means it's a "money pit".

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

My thought just reading the subject line....

You mean, "entrenched", "everywhere", and difficult to "eradicate"?

Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024

This isn't the biggest news...

The even bigger news that nobody suspected is that Windows is the #1 OS choice amongst Windows users.

"It's certainly something we desired. We are so grateful to our customers."

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

My first question

How much money did you pay The Register to carry your advertisement as an "article"?

Microsoft flashes Win10 users with more full-screen ads for Windows 11

Win11 easy when it is, and impossible other times

From a home user perspective, I haven't seen much issue upgrading from 10 to 11 (except resources, time, etc... the usual).

But at work, where there is a ton of configuration and policies, etc. It's not as pretty at all.

At least that's what our Windows team says.

We're not quite to the point of mass life cycle upgrades, so the timing for our company is off. That is, we can't solve this problem by buying new (in the vast majority of our platforms).

Anyone seeing this problem as well?

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

This is a bit confused.

I say that, as someone that does have some GPL licensed code that I have contributed to in major and minor ways.

You see, you come up something "great" for the Linux kernel (for example) and you don't have a "sponsor" (that could read, "supportive employer") then what you are trying to contribute may never make it into the git for the kernel. Why? Just trying to keep out special interest projects without commitment.

So, are you "not paying" if you allow and support your employees contributions to open source development and support?

The motivations for open source developers isn't about the almighty dollar, but we do appreciate it when somebody backs the fact that we are developers and tries not to squash us like a bug.

So, my recommendation would be, "support open source". In all the ways that means to you.

Paying? If you're allowing your employees to engage in open source development and support, you are "paying". Keep it up.

If you are strictly leveraging open source software, I do recommend you consider what you can give, and for many, they only thing they can think of is money... and that's fine. But it's not a requirement. To say that is about money goes against the principles of open source software.

So, I do like to ask non-contributors and "strict users only" of free software.... ask yourself, would it be ok for "insert free software here" to go away? That might suggest "money", but might also suggest closer collaboration, development and support, etc. Anyway, just ideas for how you can help preserve open source. Not a requirement, just ideas.

Putin's pro-Trump trolls accuse Harris of poaching rhinos

"Russia"

Quotes intentional. I get it... .everything and everyone that does anything from inside of Russia is "pro-Putin" and wants to see the death of everyone in Ukraine.

But honestly...AFAIK, that is not the position of the majority of people in Russia.

So, I'd be careful trying to imply that "all things Russian" means one thing or another with regards to USA politics. It could be the exact opposite.

People I've heard talk in Russia think their government and leadership is a joke.

In fact, the whole subject discussion here on The Register, could be a stealth manipulation of the truth.

Best thing to do... unplug folks.

Arm reportedly warns Qualcomm it will cancel its licenses

Clarifying

"Look, it's not like Arm was under some kind of license that freely allowed its use." - Matt Mullenweg

Sorry, but the ROI on enterprise AI is abysmal

That's why we're doubling down, baby!!

We're thinking about rebranding as R-AI-d Hat. AI all the way!!!!!!!!

Fedor-AI

CentAIOS

AI-BM

Big money, big money, big money..... Everyone will love us even more than they do today. Just ask your favorite LLM today.

Intel, AMD team with tech titans for x86 ISA overhaul

Yep, pure fear...

Btw, this is 99.9999% beneficial to Intel only. AMD, as usual, is the sucker/loser that Intel carries along because of anti-trust.

I might think differently if major computer manufacturers had even some parity with regards to Intel vs. AMD offerings. But things are still very skewed towards Intel.

Again, it's just a sham show from Intel. Typical.

I sort of hope that ARM eats Intel's lunch. Sorry AMD, but you're still a sucker/loser, but mainly because you're willing.

WordPress bans WP Engine from sponsoring or participating in user groups

The most insecure and buggiest piece of software ever

Let's get rid of the eyesore known as (now known as Voldemort to avoid his wrath), before their leader gets rid of us (it's what he wants).

I mean the product is complete trash. If security isn't important.... stay with it.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Real reason

It's not that you are sloppy with regards to your private keys, it's that the signers are all incredibly stupid. Simply put, criminals wanting more money.

As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff

IBM can teach a "master class" on this.

IBM is a true master of knowing how to get people to "quit" instead of the high cost and high visibility of "layoffs".

They know how to push your "I hate working here" buttons when desired. Saves them a ton of money and paperwork.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

My understanding...

My understanding is that for "better" Rust support, some things have to change and that means the C devs have to accommodate. And I think that's the bigger issue. Having to make changes to code purely to aid in Rust support. There's a "don't fix what isn't broke" sort of mentality about it.... but since Rust dev has already come into the kernel and is "blessed", ultimately work will have to be put on the plate C wise to accommodate. So, the "war" (if we can call it that) is who is responsible for accommodating changes for Rust?

So... I think this "war" will continue for a bit. I think once enough changes are made to the C code on Rust behalf, the war will ultimately end.

Who knows, maybe someday, Linux becomes the successful all Rust OS (vs something like Redox)?

HP secures $50M CHIPS Act boost to adapt inkjet tech for life sciences

You have been warned

Just be warned. The whole lab stops working when fluid levels are below 20%. Only genuine replacement fluid will work. Lab doors close and lock until fluid is replaced.

Before we put half a million broadband satellites in orbit, anyone want to consider environmental effects?

Quark

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

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

Waiting

We're waiting for the silver flat disk to flip and show us its other side before we go back. Until then, we wait. We've yet to explore the flat under side of our disk.

For those that think the Moon (or Earth) are spherical, watch the documentary about OJ's trip to the moon in the movie, Capricorn One. Getting the truth out.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

"WTF names their software as though it is malicious software?"

Have no idea. - Darktrace

Whiners

You got an apology. What else could anyone want?

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Using "old guy" ideas to get "young people"?

Telling younger audiences to "come to my conference" is akin to giving them a "mix tape".

With that said, there's always the "money plays". This would be for anything "hip", like AI or K8s or DevOps, etc. If anyone thinks they'll magically get a huge salary upgrade, perhaps they'll do whatever you say. Even figure out how to listen to your "mix tape".

The idea of live "groups" for the purpose of "networking" and beyond... again, these are "old guy" concepts.

I think there are even bigger issues, the fact that young people have zero interest in computing, or perhaps I should say, computing that requires thought. Everything has become a "cut and paste" to get a "flashy response", without knowledge. That is now what an IT specialist has become.

The advent of LLMs and AI is making that perhaps worse. The ability to Google-Fu something (what I just referred to as an IT specialist) vs the ease of "AI" producing and possibly executing the "cut and paste"....

Beijing says state owns China's rare earth metals

Remember, US levels of just about "anything" are strictly due to regulation

We don't mine. We don't do "dirty". Just as with fossil fuels where briefly we became the number one producer, even without all the building btw, the USA bottleneck is usually self inflicted. So, maybe not as "scary" as the headlines make it out to be. But, some things would take "time" to get back up and running and expanded. So, I wouldn't say the USA is "tapped out", but rather, we "ban ourselves" to restrict "the dirty" stuff. Just my observation.

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

Around the corner... systemd-llama: "You don't need to do anything, we got this."

Microsoft unbundling Teams is to appease regulators, not give customers a better deal

Captain Obvious!!

This sort of "news" could be a "one liner"... or better yet, not said at all.

But in case there are people like this in the world, just fyi, "Grass is green. Sky is blue."

KDE 6 misses boat to make it into Kubuntu 24.04

Ok to wait

Historically speaking, with KDE, it's been better to wait a bit before using the new major release.

But I'll admit, KDE Plasma 6 is better than past major releases. Which either means breakages are coming and haven't been seen yet, or that it's been handled better than in the past.

Add bacteria to the list of things that can run Doom

We are a peculiar people indeed

Next week, we'll have Doom playing using H-bomb explosions using above ground, below ground, undersea, etc. on a large scale pixel map on a spherical surface that can be viewed and played from the surface of the moon.

(we're having some problems with certain colors, but we'll fix them on the next planet)

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Used TI Explorers

Never used a Symbolics, but did use TI Explorers. The ability to right easily partitionable workloads that allowed for many Explorers to simultaneously work together (in my case for auto routing) was amazing. I mean, a Sun box may be "faster" at the time, but not vs. 10 TI Explorers and you just couldn't glue those Suns together that simply.

The data is the code.... pretty cool stuff.