* Posts by cjcox

128 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Mar 2011

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KDE 6 misses boat to make it into Kubuntu 24.04

cjcox

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

cjcox

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

cjcox

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.

Linux Kernel of the Beast 6.6.6 exorcised by angelic 6.6.7 update

cjcox

Incomplete

666, while co-opted by "the beast" is man's number.

Which in all fairness, makes for even a better reason for Ubuntu to have exploited this.

But I do realize we have a "TV/movie" reading style when it comes to the Bible.

US willing to compromise with Nvidia over AI chip sales to China

cjcox

Arms for hostages....

I mean, GPUs for cheap labor. My bad.

You can always count on the USA for "big talk" followed by ... "deals". Predictable. Too much money at stake. The President knows that "bringing it all back" to the USA, means nasty, dirty, industry. We love you China!! Keep making our "stuff"!! So we can have a "good" Christmas under the tree.

RHEL and Alma Linux 9.3 arrive – one is free, one merely free of charge

cjcox

Fool me once...

IMHO, banking on a Red Hat "thing" like Stratis, where Red Hat often times "kicks you in the you-know-what" is a mistake.

Red Hat has proven to be the Microsoft of Linux distros. Promoting, deploying, supporting... and then completely dropping enterprise things.

Let the buyer beware.

Intel's Arun Gupta on open source pragmatism and fanatics

cjcox

Freedom is the whole idea

So, the idea of what the above mistakenly calls, "giving it all away", is actually about making sure things live on in perpetuity.

What "lasts"? Proprietary IP decaying on a shelf in hopes of being leveraged in "a deal"? Or free software that is in use being maintained by motivated people that want to ensure it's continued use?

Actually, Red Hat's experiment in trying to prove that freedom is a bad idea actually proved the exact opposite.

As Red Hat closed down the sharing of GPL code changes made by people outside of Red Hat that, in their words, represented exploitation (that is they didn't want other to exploit "their work", when in actuality, it wasn't "their work" to begin with)... as they closed this down. What happened?

Did everyone give up on freedom? Did the freedom model die? Did we all cough up "IP bucks" to Red Hat as they now claimed to own "all code changes" as being solely "their own"?

No. That's not what happened at all. What Red Hat, IBM and other no believe (for whatever reason) to be true about FOSS was now proven to be a lie and freedom ruled instead.

What happened is that each and every one of the supposed "exploiting" companies that were using FOSS from Red Hat moved to alternative paths where freedom still rules. So, the world went on, FOSS went on and Red Hat's experiment with trying to make FOSS into traditional closed IP failed. Which is a good thing for freedom and a bad thing for Red Hat's reputation.

But Red Hat has been actively working on damaging their reputation now from many years. "Buying" FOSS, making a "good message" and then actively trying (and oddly enough partially successful) in trying to kill off the FOSS they purchased. Now, you may say, you can't kill FOSS, isn't that your point? The problem is Red Hat when they "buy all the people" behind a FOSS project can suppress freedom to the point where it struggles to survive. No, you can't kill off the source, Red Hat has just gotten really good at making FOSS developers effectively "die", and that hurts freedom overall.

Anyhow, I do hope all those (truly great) now "owned" by Red Hat projects continue on without Red Hat, since they (for whatever reason) decided to oppress them. Btw, not talking about RHEL cloning, talking more about things like RHV. I mean, would qemu/kvm be where it's at without Qumanet (Red Hat acquired them)? Guided by "marketing" and "corporate pressure", Red Hat abandoned their hypervisor stack at a time when we really "needed one". I have no idea why they did this. Good case of wondering where this might have gone if the ideas of freedom were used rather than attempts at destruction. So, oVirt? Has Red Hat oppressed you to the point of extinction? We'll see.

Anyway, from JBoss, to oVirt/RHV, to .... what will be next? XFS? LVM? Sure, all the code is protect by "freedom", but when the workers are oppressed, freedom does suffer a bit.

We could say, "we need a new leader". Sure. But maybe we just get another Red Hat, or possibly worse.

Long live developers that are not "under a thumb" and that still practice and believe in the power of freedom. Send your checks/support directly to those... and not to Red Hat (not anymore). Better yet, become a developer so as to fight for FOSS.

All I know is that if "survival" as a developer means being on the Red Hat payroll, we're doomed. FOSS isn't dependent on Red Hat, especially not anymore.

X looks back at year of so-called 'engineering excellence' under Musk

cjcox

Move on already

We need to get to Wayland as soon as possible.

Red Hat bins Bugzilla for RHEL issue tracking, jumps on Jira

cjcox

No suprise.

Moving to dependencies on closed source software, does seem to be the next big evolutionary step for Red Hat.

Waiting for them to move their infrastructure to Azure and 365. It simply makes sense.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

cjcox

Volume, relationships, market, etc.

If Windows is "in the cloud", what did people buy to access it?

There's a lot more than just the "OS" to think about. There are all the partner relationships (the monopoly) you have consider as well.

I mean, does the future hold a whole lot of cheap Chromebooks?

What about enthusiasts, creators, gamers?

While Windows in the cloud is a good idea, it isn't going to displace Windows on end devices, probably not ever.

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

cjcox

Of course, hibernation predates systemd (been around a long time in Linux)

The problem with hibernation, unless you can somehow come up with a compact structure representation for memory that works most of the time, is that hibernation is going to want enough swap to match your memory size (plus a little).

In today's SSD flash (don't write needlessly) world, and cheap memory world, running without swap is "a thing". For many reasons.

But, if hibernation is something you want/need, it works pretty well with Linux (noting that there are ton of edge cases).

AlmaLinux project climbs down from being a one-to-one RHEL clone

cjcox

It could be good, time to not define "enterprise" in terms of IBM

I for one would love to see SUSE become the more favorable choice. Why? In all honesty, they think "enterprise" a whole lot better than Red Hat did/does.

IBM as one of the bigger exploiters of Linux without giving back too much, just really wants something "internally" that they can leverage for their closed source solutions. Having Red Hat (or whatever IBM may call it in the future) gives them what they want. IBM just wants people to buy IBM (closed) stuff. And now they have the platform to aid with that.

Sure, I'd love to hang on to the Red Hat of old, but the last vestiges of that went away shortly after the acquisition by IBM. The "promise" of not touching Red Hat, well.. it's just too hard to keep alive a truly independent culture inside IBM. As for old Red Hat, I still miss you. And again, just for old Red Hat, you did good.

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

cjcox

Re: It is a violation, please read

Subscriptions end, begin, expire, renew, change, etc. All of that is outside of the GPL.

Because of its insertion as a qualification it's a problem. However, Red Hat did responded to my misgivings with regards to their change of policy assuring me that upon request source code access will be provided.

So, my argument is true, but Red Hat has another path for getting to the source. Something they didn't spell out clearly when they made their announcement.

cjcox

Re: It is a violation, please read

Btw, someone claiming to be a Red Hat employee did reach out to me and said that all you have to do is ask and the source will be provided to you in some (he said USB) electronic format. However, their agreement text says $5 USD. I'd argue if people take them up on the offer, and if everyone asks, it will cost Red Hat at lot more than what they were doing before. Why? Because it's not "one version" that they'd have to make source code wise, but that which matches the level of distribution (remember, Red Hat has chose that game to play here, not me) to a particular end party. It's a harder thing to to track, IMHO, you'd have to provide more than "I need source for 8", because one person might have 8.5, another, 8.6 and of course the packages will vary, though maybe Red Hat will simply ship to you the source for all packages (we'll assume?).

Regardless, anytime a company makes a change away from easy access to more difficult access, but yet, still "tip toe-ing the letter of the GPL" line, the end result still could be consumer distrust. But that's all outside of the GPL. Up to Red Hat with regards to managing their image.

Corporate image issues aside, it does appear that at least some employees at Red Hat are interested in being at least "letter" compliant with the GPL. And this is good news. So, the source is somehow going to be available. I know Rocky LInux has stated they have figured out "their path".... they just didn't give any detail about that.... but I figured Red Hat may have reached out (??) to discuss the "new path" if the old path is now restricted.

We'll see. Red Hat obviously has the right to do whatever within the rights granted to them by licensing they're under. Personally, I still miss the more over the top FOSS advocacy of Red Hat of old though. Where, you knew what they "could do", and they always went above and beyond, surprising many people.

cjcox

Re: If RH can't do this...

SUSE source is completely available, arguably "the path" isn't quite as convenient though (but perhaps simply due to lack of knowledge?). I did post on their forum that there's an opportunity for them here to become the preferred cloned enterprise distro. A lot of what SUSE provides isn't "well known" and they provide a lot. So, it's also possible that if people better understood what all SUSE provides they might say "wow. that's 10x better than Red Hat of old"... and that may well be the case. We'll see.

cjcox

It is a violation, please read

Quote: The key point a lot of the louder critics have missed is that the GPL only obliges the Hat to provide source code to parties to whom it has provided binaries, and not to the rest of the world. Red Hat customers still can get the source code, so the Hat isn't violating the GPL.

Red Hat only provides access to binaries distributed WHILE there is active support subscription in place. This means that access to all source and modification ends without the contract. And that's a restriction that defies section 3 of GPLv2. From a (non-GPL) worldly corporate closed IP world, that may seem "fair", but it's definitely not GPL compliant.

And, as I've pointed out, even if the above were "free", it's still a violation. Why? It's a restricted control point of access to what must be made available by requiring "something else". No different than saying the GPL has an addendum to Section 3 that says "you must be able to do 50 pull ups to get the source." Fortunately, this is not true.

As a workaround, people with the non-GPL compliant restricted access to the source can make that source available to the world. But that's hardly a solution to Red Hat's anti-GPL problem.

Edit: Also, a distribution is a distribution. The only case for non-source availability is a completely internal distribution. Red Hat's (bad) argument, if true, would mean that every subscription holder is part of Red Hat, to which I say, "Where's my paycheck, stock and corporate benefits?"

Google formally accuses monopolist Microsoft of trapping people in its cloud

cjcox

Do as I do and not as I do.

I think it's funny when "evil company A" wants to accuse "evil company B" of doing an evil they didn't think of first.

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

cjcox

When you steal, steal from unimportant people.

Words to live by.

New models of IBM Model F keyboard Mark II incoming

cjcox

My old M13

I still have an old all black IBM M13. It's in pretty ok shape.

After 11 years, Atlassian customers finally get custom domains ... they don't want

cjcox

Funny in a dark way

I think it's humorous when people "threaten" (don't get to riled up about the word) leaving Atlassian.

It's got its hook in you good, you're not leaving. They could kill all your puppy friends and you will still never leave.

And they know it.

Microsoft switches Edge’s PDF reader to pay-to-play Adobe Acrobat

cjcox

Not said...

Getting paid to dump a working solution for a virus farm. And then release a "story" to make people applaud.

Power grid worries force Amazon to run Oregon datacenters using fuel cells

cjcox

Heat?

Would think this solution would produce maybe an order of magnitude or more heat. If that's interesting.

IPv6 for Dummies: NSA pushes security manual on DoD admins

cjcox

IPv6 on Windows is pretty much an easy hackfest

Because DHCPv6 is default, present and strangely required there, apart from fully disabling IPv6 on Windows, you can pretty much take over everything fairly easily on Windows today with local network access. But, feel free to "school" me on this. To this date, Microsoft hasn't helped to mitigate this problem.

Bill shock? The red ink of web services doesn’t come out of the blue

cjcox

While it varies... primary goal is reducing expensive headcount costs.

While it varies... primary goal is reducing expensive headcount costs. I think any company going into "cloud" thinking otherwise is probably not thinking very well. I'm always amazed at the number of people that struggle doing very basis systems engineering and operations though. If that's you, then cloud may also help because, well, you stink at doing the basics. Also, as I've found when we run "our own shop" we get an extra "9" vs. what we get out of cloud... if that's important. Is running your own IT harder? Yes and no. Why? You ultimately have more flexibility and predictability (if you know the basics) if you run your own store. Cloud can also be problematic in that to really get the most out of it, you do have to "choose" your cloud provider. Otherwise, things get so generic that you may not cost justify the move nearly as much. Again, YMMV.

Six years later, HPE and Oracle quietly shut door on Solaris lawsuit

cjcox

There's an old saying...

Live by proprietary closed IP, die by proprietary closed IP.

It's interesting because at the time, in the Linux enterprise space, it was somewhat popular to support your competitor's OS.... I think HP thought the same... except for that darn proprietary closed IP situation.

Of course, nobody cares now as "the wall came down" and we could care less about ancient closed Unix systems anymore.

Startup raises $30 million for wireless power delivery system

cjcox

What's that smell?

Smells like roast pork. - Dr. Temperance Brennan

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

cjcox

Sniff, sniff... what's that I smell?

Well, I'd love to say it's the smell of eco-ink in the name of the planet, but there's actually a stink to this.

But rather than focus on the stench, let's focus on the sound, the sound of throwaway printers and oodles of cash thrown at very very very cost inefficient ink printers, and the exploitation of man done mainly by Epson.

I'm sorry, but nothing about Epson's announcement has any shred of truth behind it. This is a horrible attempt at creating landfill and empty wallets to the benefit of Epson. Period.

Judge tells Amazon: Stop retaliating against employees

cjcox

But it's Christmas

In a strange turn of events, I heard the judge was sent an Amazon alert that all their recent purchases are now "out of stock".

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

cjcox

No viable suggestion of alternative?

Suggesting vendor proprietary service solutions or formats as the alternative?

I'm sorry, but give me PDF.

IBM: Hey Joe, we make chips, too. How about some of 'em subsidies?

cjcox

If anyone can figure out how to take "free money" from our gov't and spend it in China, it's IBM

IBM is the master of deception.

Malwarebytes blocks Google, YouTube as malware

cjcox

Don't use Malwarebytes

The only company that introduces the best new feature and then... takes it away.

Source: IBM disguised Watson Health layoffs as a 'redeployment initiative'

cjcox

I'll take Big Blue for 100

6,000 leaving

Watson: What is, bathroom break?

Network congestion algorithms have design flaw, says MIT

cjcox

Not necessarily related

MIT is also rebranding itself simply as "Karen"

This tiny Intel Xeon-toting PC board can take your Raspberry Pi any day

cjcox

Tiny HSF?

Does it come with a tiny HSF?

When will the UK take another giant leap into space?

cjcox

Rocket Who

There's a plan to launch a blue police box. However, they're not sure when or where it will land.

AWS sales boss claims Microsoft's softened cloud licensing regime is a sham

cjcox

Battle of the bottom feeders?

Not sure I'd lift up either company as being "ethical".

CP/M's open-source status clarified after 21 years

cjcox

Re: My Osborne 01 ran.......

I had Turbo Pascal, C, COBOL, LISP and Z80 Macro Assembler on mine. I even wrote an IBM 360 to Z80 using that macro assembler so I could save money at school (those that know, know what I mean).

I had the 300 baud pulse modem that fit into one of the floppy slots. I even replaced the DIR routine in CP/M with a dialer I could use from the command line. So I could dial into the mainframe and use OSWYLBUR to upload.

Wrote some games for CP/M (fly the character ship around, shoot stuff sort of thing)

Wrote my own letter quality font to output from Wordstar to my FX-80 (which didn't have the font cartridge). I turned in some papers done that way, teachers called it out, "what font is this?" (they were not impressed)

It was almost perfect, but could have used 132 columns, limited to 128, it worked for most mainframe stuff.

It would be many many many years before I had a computer that did as much.

cjcox

Finally.

Now the beast is released. PC-DOS is going to go down.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

cjcox

We can only assume

We can only assume that the author of this piece was on some kind of wild acid trip. Why? Because, because it's complete fantasy. Most would call it garbage, but I'm going to be nice. I may not be a Microsoft insider, but the author of this piece isn't even in our galaxy.

Hey, I may need some of whatever you're on to "get over" your poorly researched article.

PCIe 7.0 pegged to arrive in 2025 with speeds of 512 GBps

cjcox

And, as with anything, faster means hotter

I think we need something faster that doesn't produce so much heat. Anyone got a revolutionary idea handy?

HP turns back on $1b in annual sales by quitting Russia and Belarus

cjcox

Gotta love headline wording, HP turned back on....

If I start a sentence with "HP turned back on...." doesn't that sound like they have started doing something again that they had stopped doing prior?

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

cjcox

What??

Microsoft teases Linux. They definitely do not love Linux.

If they loved Linux they would support their products on it. They don't. You say, "but what about Teams? SQL Server? Powershell? WSL?"

Actually, it's part of my point. Because in all of those cases where Microsoft has a temporal port or build or integration to Linux, it is very poorly supported. And their track record for long term support on Linux is horrendous. It's a closed source company, and they believe in their model (only). That is, you drive your workers to make your software better by giving them rewards/punishment. You will not find a lot of coding pride there, because it's just the wrong culture. Software that costs them money to make/support and nets them nothing, gets cut.

So, with regards to NTFS. Don't use it.

It's a primitive file system in many ways, it's designed for Windows. I say, leave it there.

Let's just leave Windows on its rapidly becoming deserted island. They don't want to leave their island, and they certainly do not want to be helped. They're happy there.

Microsoft plans to drop SMB1 binaries from Windows 11

cjcox

Re: Very old.

You're not thinking Microsoft. The protocol is old, but the devices still relying on it aren't that old, and that's the point. Experts (that is, people outside of Microsoft) hacked SMB1 eons ago, but it didn't stop appliances from continuing to rely on it.

So, you say, Microsoft is smart... ok then, then they knew 15+ years ago that it was hack city, just like the rest of us. So, it took them 15+ years to close this down? Whatever....

cjcox

Very old.

Mind you, very old meaning 7+ years old. Just so you know what "very old" means.

Microsoft created the beast, gave us the neighborhood, praised its holy name as lord god of os features.

And now they admit they were absolute morons. Typical Microsoft.

'IBM is now a very different company' says CEO as Q1 2022 beats expectations

cjcox

We need to wait

Some companies are masters of "creative accounting". Probably need to see several consecutive quarters before making any determination.

And IBM is "big", which means they can masquerade "stuff" at will via acquisitions and sell offs. So, even after a year, we might still not truly know what is going on.

Atlassian comes clean on what data-deleting script behind outage actually did

cjcox

Atlassian is making the official report available

You can get the official report if you install the Jira Oopsie Plugin, which is free for up to 10 users, then a mere $10/mo. per user greater than 10. There's also a Premium level that removes some important redactions at $20/mo. per user. The ability to go beyond page 1 of any report is supplied through the Atlassian Markeplace with plugins such as Money Money Money, you will have to check the marketplace for current pricing.

US Army to build largest 3D-printed structures in the Americas

cjcox

Blast from my past (old technology)

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

Red Hat gets RHEL 8.2 certified for high level US government security

cjcox

Red Hat catches up

11/11/2021 - SUSE was awarded with the Common Criteria Certification (NIAP OSPP) for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2. This certification is mandatory for work with the United States (US) Federal Government. It demonstrates compliance to NIAP Protection Profile for General Purpose Operating Systems, Version 4.2.1 (CCEVS-VR-PP-0047) with the Extended Package for Secure Shell (SSH), Version 1.0 (CCES-VR-PP-0039). This certification extends our Common Criteria Certification track by US Compliance Regulations enabling US federal entities to profit from SUSE’s Certified Secure Software Supply Chain while complying with all necessary national regulations.

Samba 4.16 release strips away more SMB 1

cjcox

Samba and SMB1, saving landfill

I have a network scanner, Canon ScanFront, and while it's running the latest available firmware, it can only write to an SMB1 exposed fileshare.

Thank you Samba for keeping this out of landfill. It's a great device.

We scan and just pick up the scanned image off the drive.

I'd like to keep the device for as long as I can (hint).

New Linux kernel bolsters random number generation

cjcox

Re: A puzzle about random numbers.........

https://www.kodyaz.com/images/pics/random-number-generator-dilbert-comic.jpg

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