Posts by cjcox

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.

Linux Kernel of the Beast 6.6.6 exorcised by angelic 6.6.7 update

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

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

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

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

Move on already

We need to get to Wayland as soon as possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

When you steal, steal from unimportant people.

Words to live by.

New models of IBM Model F keyboard Mark II incoming

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

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.