Posts by Sam Adams the Dog

The most important experimental distro you've never heard of gets new project lead

Re: Home directory

The company I worked for (I'm retired now) was Linux focused. We supported MacOS and Windows because our customer base required them, but Linux was our primary dev platform and was widely deployed within the company for canonical git repos, QA & tech-support infrastructure,, etc. — not to even mention the configuration of the nodes of our internal research/production clusters and our cloud infrastructure. (The company is a high-performance scientific computing company. Pre-Linux, we supported 6 commercial UNIXes.)

It greatly simplified life that our laptops (which in most cases indeed were used by as single designated user) mirrored the file systems on our production and infrastructure machines. It simplified life not only for our sysadms, who were doing the configuration, but also for internal users, who regularly moved back and forth between their laptops and our shared infrastructure. I'm not sure whether /home on the laptops contained everyone's home dir or only that of the designated user (plus maybe a guest account for on-site demos). But even if it's only present for the one true designated user, I don't see that the provision of this simple layer caused any problems for anyone and it certainly to simplified life for everyone.

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Well, some of us still remember rec.aquarium vs. sci.aquarium from the '80s, perhaps the first online flame war. At least, the first I encountered.

-P.

GitHub code search redesign can't find many fans

Poorly thought out UIs

"The only good thing about this new UI, it has given me a reason to move off Github completely and to self-host with anything that doesn't have a poorly thought out UI."

But there is nothing that doesn't have a poorly thought out UI.

Nations agree to curb enthusiasm for military AI before it destroys the world

Why can't we just wait till afterwards?

Tesla faked self-driving demo, Autopilot engineer testifies

Re: Nothing new is happening ...

I understand that when a building is put up, the builders are supposed to supply an "as built" plan to correct the original architect's and engineer's "as planned" plan. I don't know how often they actually do so, but either way, I wish this were done in SW development. .

In an Agile project I was involved in, the spec for each sprint was published, but more often than not, something had to be changed along the way. The changes were never documented. The net result was that there was no written documentation for the program "as built"; knowledge resided in the recollection of the product and project managers and developers. Since I was an add-on to the project, in a product management role, in order to design (and assist in the implementation of) a particular facility, I did quite a bit of testing to make sure it worked in context.

Once I saw something surprising happen and asked someone who had been on the product management team at a high level for a long time, "What is the program supposed to do when X happens?" He couldn't tell me. He said, "Why don't you try it and see?" Well, I had already tried it and seen, but it was not satisfactory. What I was really after was "What is SUPPOSED to happen" in this situation. I didn't know whether what I had seen was an implementation failure or a design failure.

IIRC, the lamented Fred Brooks said that every project of any size require a "Librarian", to keep track of project documentation and keep it up to date. That book was written in the waterfall era and I think technologists using more recent development paradigms have largely assumed that this role was no longer required. But my (limited) experience, described above, leads me to believe that it is needed as much in the agile era as in the waterfall era, or maybe even more so.

Koch-funded group sues US state agency for installing 'spyware' on 1m Android devices

Not exactly. The question has always been how far the "unlawful search and seizure" clause in the Bill of RIghts extends to anything and everything that a person may do privately. The upshot was that the decision about making abortion legal was thrown to the states. In the four situations in which that proposal was voted upon in the most recent election, all four states (including Kentucky, a very conservative state) voted to make it legal.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal of liberals and a feminist, joined the court after Roe v. Wade was originally decided. She stated publicly that she felt the case was incorrectly decided, and that it should have been left to the states, which is, in facts, what just happened.

Re: ASSuming

Well of course. Why did your comment even need to be made? Nobody said "It must be true;" many (including myself) have agreed that "If it's true, it's bad."

War declared on bosses using 'omnipresent surveillance' tools to quash union efforts

Re: Depends on who owns the computer...

@Neil Barnes

I'm dubious about the utility, except maybe in extreme cases. I wouldn't assume it's MBA driven. Surveillance and AI based upon it might be described as a solution in search of a problem (if it's a solution to ANY problem), and it's the kind of thing that extreme techies might suggest to management as an aid to performance appraisal. (Shudder.) Not to even mention that the belief that Big Brother is Watching You is not exactly conducive to a happy, healthy work environment.

As to relationships between employers and employees in the U. S., it all depends on the company and which employees you are talking about.

I am retired from a company that has over the years consistently been cited as one of the best places in NY (and even the US, I think) to work.

Amazon, on the other hand is sometimes cited by employees as terrible. I don't know how much of that is belly-aching to arouse public support for unionization. But even some high level employees, including one whom I know and respect, have left after a relatively short time, commenting that it is a bizarre and awful work environment.

But then I know another who spent several years there and left for a position that interested him more. He respected the Amazon weltanschauung. He worked there over twenty years ago, a long time ago in the life of Amazon. Still, he liked it, though he was challenged and worked long hours. I suspect that warehouse workers are more likely to get surveilled than either of these friends.

Depends on who owns the computer...

Regarding key logging, etc. on employees' computers, the question is who owns the computers. If they're talking about computers owned by the employees, it's very bad. If it's computers used by employees that are owned by the employer and used exclusively for work, then I don't see a "rights" problem with it. Use your own computer when you're off the job; on the job, you already know that your email is monitored, etc. Why would you use the device for anything that's not work-related, anyway?

That's not to say that I think it's likely to be very useful to the employer.

-P.

Brain-inspired chips promise ultra-efficient AI, so why aren’t they everywhere?

The obvious answer is ...

--- that a simulation of a brain cannot be better than a brain, and most brains are not very smart.

Draft EU AI Act regulations could have a chilling effect on open source software

Sentience of AI

Google's Pichai "admitted that Google's AI voice assistant sometimes fails to understand and respond appropriately to requests. "The good news is that anyone who talks to Google Assistant—while I think it is the best assistant out there for conversational AI — you still see how broken it is in certain cases," he said.

Wait... what if it's sentient but merely hard of hearing?

Forrester rates virtual machine infrastructure ‘stale or risky’

Correct me if I'm wrong, please....

... and indeed I may be wrong.

It seems to me (as a professed amateur and dilettante) that:

1. Cloud instances usually are VMs. If so, how can you tout the Cloud while denigrating VMs?

2. Yes, VMs have a large attack surface, so security indeed could be a significant concern. But has this manifested itself in recent years?

3. Not all software, internally or externally developed, has been containerized, and these constitute a rather large library of applications in many or most commercial settings, and so VMs seem like an excellent solution to keeping them running.

Even robots have the right to learn from open source

People who think this is terrible are basically nuts

May I remind you that it is completely legal in every way to make commercial use of FOSS code? Think of all those commercial HPC clusters running Linux.

And there has never been a prohibition against reading FOSS code, seeing what you can learn from, it, and using what you have learned when writing your own proprietary code. Yes, fuller attribution would have been gentlemanly, but there is no FOSS requirement to be gentlemanly, as anyone who has listened to Linus or Stallman over the years well knows.

Those who point out that most FOSS code is crap are likely right, but there is no justification for the assumption that the training process assumes that it is all great. Though I don't know what the process was, it is extremely unlikely not to be that, even aside from the fact that FOSS code varies strongly from case to case in code style, safety and correctness.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Re: "Linux Desktop"

I suspect that if you run Windows you'll HAVE to play Stairway to Heaven. And if you run MacOS, you won't be able to do so even if you want to. (Or is it the other way around?)

Intel buys cloud-optimization startup Granulate

GPUs?

The question was raised in the article whether Intel would optimize for ARM as well as Intel architectures. But if the focus is on HPC, they would also have to take GPUs (especially Nvidia CUDA) into account. This strikes me as a much tougher problem.

But presumably, even in its absence, there' are a lot of of non-HPC workflows (and HPC applications that cannot or have not been CUDAfied) that would benefit.

Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

Re: First time I heard of her -- thanks!

Also, many of the early programmers were trained in the humanities, as Mary Coombs was, rather than in the STEM fields.

Microsoft engineer fixes enterprise-level Chromium bug students could exploit to cheat in online tests

Re: (sigh)

How sure are you that it's the institution's PC? That was not stated in the article. It seems logical to assume that students taking an exam can take it on their own computers.

This was my first question as well. Could not the authoring software place the answers, together with the grading infrastructure, on a separate domain that requires its own authentication?

Since this issue was identified so long ago, I wonder if it was ever reported to the companies that write the testing software. It does not sound hard to fix this at the app level.

Give us your biometric data to get your lunch in 5 seconds, UK schools tell children

The only relevant question....

The only relevant question is how many seconds it would take to get their lunch without facial recognition.

Facebook apologises after its AI system branded Black people as primates

But black people ARE primates!

... as are white people.

Audacity users stick the knife – and fork – in to strip audio editor of unwanted features

How about "Audible City"?

How about "Audible City"?

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Re: There are two hard problems in Computer Science

You type "illeterate" and then refer to illiterate Americans?

'A massive middle finger': Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture

Who the hell cares?

What the report omits is a count of active members who did not respond either way. I would guess that they constitute a vast majority of active Audacity users who don't give a damn either way.

Half a million stolen French medical records, drowned in feeble excuses

Bladderdash!

My bladder capacity is subnormal, but my capacity for blabber remains unlimited.

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

"Call Me"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEnQbap_8dM

Oracle's Java 15 rides into town, waving the 'we're number one' flag, demands 25th birthday party

"Java is in real trouble with a loss of -3.18 per cent in comparison to last year,"

"Java is in real trouble with a loss of -3.18 per cent in comparison to last year,"

Wait! A loss of -3.18% is a GAIN of 3.18%.

Keep it Together, Microsoft: New mode for vid-chat app Teams reminds everyone why Zoom rules the roost

Skeumorphism gone crazy!

The one good idea is assigned places. Everything else sounds really awful. I don't know if the leader can assign places, though, which would be useful, especially if we want to go "around the room" making comments or brief presentations. And all that wasted space in the corny elementary-school auditorium mockup. And if I want to turn off the camera, it's usually because I'm still in my underwear. Oh well; black electrician's tape might still work. (Well, not for underwear, but you know what I mean....)

Zoom bomb: Vid conf biz to snap up Keybase as not-a-PR-move move gets out of hand

Bruce Schneier likes zoom

Security guru Bruce Schneier recently blogged that he likes Zoom and that they have fixed the most egregious recently disclosed security flaws. He also mentioned that they have some ways to go with key management and with security for the free app, and that the web version remains unencrypted. But he still uses it, even for corporate business. And he likes the feature set.

COBOL-coding volunteers sought as slammed mainframes slow New Jersey's coronavirus response

This is not technical debt!

Others have made the same point I'm making without using the words I just used.

Technical debt is when you do a rush job and don't write your code in the manner currently mandated for maintainability and extensibility.

There is no evidence that this happened when the code was written. And (pointed out by others) it's worked fine all along.

This is purely the fact that the code and infrastructure are too slow to handle the suddenly increased load. A capacity problem, as someone else pointed out. They could upgrade their hardware (still possible, as others have pointed it out), or contract out the excess, presumably to IBM. The latter is presumably the wiser course because this rat will work its way through the snake in time.

Grsecurity maker finally coughs up $300k to foot open-source pioneer Bruce Perens' legal bill in row over GPL

Re: So, let me get this straight

You don't have it straight. You have it backwards. OSS is the big company, and they lost the case against Perens, paying $300,000.

The article concludes, "As to whether OSS's redistribution terms violate the GPL, that has yet to be tested in court."

So OSS has lost one case so far and the second case has not yet been adjudicated, or, possibly, even filed.

Where's our software, Langowski? Windows Insider Program gets new leader

Developing on the Edge with Kyle Pflug

If Microsoft Edge Developer Experience was really a 1970s prog rock band, what role would an individual with a name like Kyle Pflug have?

(a) Lead singer

(b) Front man

(c) Manager / Publicity agent

(d) Roadie

(e) Bus driver

(f) Write in your own answer: __________________________

Apple fans may think they can't get viruses but Cupertino disagrees: WWDC 2020 dev summit goes online-only

Re: Conferences and summits need to get with the program

Maybe we need to have live summits to reduce the lines at the supermarkets.

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Here's the solution

The contractors should get together and start an offshore operation, say in India or the (shudder) EU. That offshore operation then gets contracted for services, takes a small cut, and hires the contractors. Or the contractors could even be employees of the offshore enterprise. Perhaps the contractors themselves would cooperatively own the contracting body.

You're welcome,

SATD.

SF tech biz forks out $146m in fines, settlements after painkiller makers bribed it to design medical software that pushed opioids to patients

As in all else, Orwell is correct.

"The big guys spend 1.5-2 X more on selling as they do on actual R&D."

Yes, but all advertising has to more than pay for itself to be sensible. Without spending those big bucks on advertising, their ales would be lower, so their revenue would be lower; and therefore their research budget (which in pharma runs about 20% of revenue) would also be lower.

Not, of course that I in any way condone the practice that this article is about.

Microsoft: Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, my PowerShell has gone RC

Santa is not an elf!

'The annual tracking of "Santa" is due to get underway shortly, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) will be using satellite imagery from Bing Maps to make things a little more, er, realistic for those wishing to monitor the magical elf.'

Umm, Santa is not an elf!

Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage

La Dame aux Camelias

I guess that makes Elizabeth "La Dame aux Camelias"....

IBM ships software portfolio into containers thanks to Red Hat providing the packaging

What took them so long?

When the (scientific software) company I used to work for got onto the Cloud, we had a heck of a hard time getting our major pharmaceutical customers to buy into it. They were concerned about security. We would ask, "Do you really think your own security infrastructure is more robust than Amazon's?" There were some lead adopters, but not many, and yet many of these same companies were outsourcing their internal IT to outside organizations, especially IBM, in what was sometimes called an "insourcing" arrangement.

We had close relations with IBM at the time, had historically supported AIX, etc., and I remember telling our contacts at IBM that if you had a cloud, all your existing IT-management customers would buy in, because they would be willing to trust you, even if they don't trust Amazon. IBM would respond with some nonsense like "Well, we already have a cloud." It was not by any means what a cloud had already come to mean at that time. What they had was a farm of supercomputers, fixed partitions of which you could lease by the day, week or month, based on what might be a long reservation list. A cloud implied leasing virtual equipment by the hour, the provision expanding and contracting per demand.

Their Cloud-Pak and OpenShift technologies sound good and are somewhat orthogonal to IBM's public cloud, but I feel they missed a big opportunity not that many years ago.

Admittedly, it takes a lot of water to turn a big ship around, plus they were frying other fish.

What took them so long?

When the (scientific software) company I used to work for got onto the Cloud, we had a heck of a hard time getting our major pharmaceutical customers to buy into it. They were concerned about security. We would ask, "Do you really think your own security infrastructure is more robust than Amazon's?" There were some lead adopters, but not many, and yet many of these same companies were outsourcing their internal IT to outside organizations, especially IBM, in what was sometimes called an "insourcing" arrangement.

We had close relations with IBM at the time, had historically supported AIX, etc., and I remember telling our contacts at IBM that if you had a cloud, all your existing IT-management customers would buy in, because they would be willing to trust you, even if they don't trust Amazon. IBM would respond with some nonsense like "Well, we already have a cloud." It was not by any means what a cloud had already come to mean at that time. What they had was a farm of supercomputers that you could lease by the day, week or month, based on what might be a long reservation list. A cloud implied leasing virtual equipment by the hour, the provision expanding and contracting per demand.

Their Cloud-Pak and OpenShift technologies are somewhat orthogonal to their own public cloud, but I feel they missed a big opportunity not that many years ago. Admittedly, it takes a lot of water to turn a big ship around, plus they were frying other fish.

Bill G on Microsoft's biggest blunder... Was it Bing, Internet Explorer, Vista, the antitrust row?

As in all else, Orwell is correct.

Well, umm, there were a few more problems with Android in the times you mention, including one which persists now, or might only be ending now: The inability to get OS upgrades was as new versions were released. Considering that the updates included fixes for security issues, that one's a biggie.

Also, and probably a result rather than a cause of the fact that Android is not the market leader, accessories are quite slow to come out for Android phones. I never could get a battery case for my L6, and that's something I can't live without. So that's when I switched to iPhone.

US prosecutors whack another three charges on list against ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch over $11bn HP biz gobble

Not necessarily!

It's interesting to me that virtually all the commentators so far believe that HP simply failed to do its due diligence.

However, the allegation is that Autonomy cooked the books and lied about their sales and revenue.

Lots of mergers and acquisitions don't go well, but very few lead to allegations of fraud against the principals of the purchased company.

Therefore, I'm inclined to give at least equal credence to the allegation: that HP did perform due diligence, but that the principals of Autonomy lied and committed fraud, perhaps in depth, i.e., by concocting and presenting fictitious accounting records.

Core-blimey! Riddle of Earth's mysterious center finally 'solved' by smarty seismologists

Gone fission....

@denarius I think the belief is still prevalent that the reason that the earth has not cooled down more than it in fact has since the birth of the solar system is that heat has indeed been generated by fission reactions deep within.

The mysterious life of Luc Esape, bug fixer extraordinaire. His big secret? He's not human

Free Beer

Most importantly, if Repairinator accepted a monetary reward for fixing a bug, how would it buy a beer for its buddies?

Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

I've always liked RSS

I use feedly.com now and am pretty happy with it.

It seems to me that The Reg used to supply RSS links to individual authors. I used to use it to keep up with new postings by Alistair Dabbs, but I haven't been able to find an alternative for a long time. Perhaps someone can tell me if there is a way to do this that I am just missing.

I like RSS a lot and have been annoyed at its gradual demise.

Python joins movement to dump 'offensive' master, slave terms

Brain-dead

But don't we already have "client" and "server" for that purpose? Or is "server" now too politically incorrect? (Or too sullied by its predominant use to refer to web clients and servers?)

How about "exploiter" and "exploited", instead, or maybe "lord" and "serf"?

Sheesh!

A decade on, Apple and Google's 30% app store cut looks pretty cheesy

They still distribute the IOS version via the Apple store.

"This means it doesn't pay the high, non-negotiable distribution fee Apple and Google both require."

Not. They still distribute the IOS version through the Apple store, perhaps because that's the only way you can distribute and IOS app.

Microsoft takes another whack at killing off Windows Phone 8.x

Not

Actually, the Palm Treo phone was the precursor to the iPhone.

Extract, transform, load? More like extremely tough to load, amirite?

How do the data integration platforms actually work?

@Trevor I thought the article was quite cogent and to the point re. ETL, which conceptually IMO is well used to apply to the problem, regardless of implementation. But I wish you had given as much detail about how the data integration platforms work as you did about the general ETL problems and its other solutions. The moreso because they are now your preferred solution. Perhaps you could do this in a future article.

Open source community crams itself into big tent

Umm....

It all sounds very tent-ative....

Are you an open-sorcerer or free software warrior? Let us do battle

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"

With apologies to Kris Kristofferson....

I can't believe how many respondents are harping on the multiple meanings of "free." Stallman told us what he meant, and we all probably agree that "free" is a crummy word to describe it, because it's bound to be misunderstood if you haven't read Stallman's gloss. But enough already about that.

Having said that, I don't subscribe to Stallman's social agenda, which is very obviously what his definition of "free" is about. He reluctantly accepted LGPL as a compromise, understanding that without such compromises the Free™ SW he espouses is unlikely to gain traction. LGPL is Free™ technically, but is in practice as usable in the commercial context as un-free open source.

Stallman was already on the slippery slope with LGPL; from there it is only a small step to BSD, MIT, and Apache open-source licenses. But the earliest BSD license (1988) actually predated GPL (1989), so I would alter the author's remarks to rather state that Free™ is what open-source became after the ideologues showed up.

Hitchcock cameo steals opening of Oracle v Google Java spat

Been there, done that

The federal appeals court that Oracle is appealing to previously took on an appeal by Oracle, which resulted in their remanding the case back to the district court for trial. The result was a unanimous jury decision for Google, which Oracle is now appealing. Which means that they have to get the federal appeals court to agree that no fair jury could possibly have rendered such a decision. Well, if so, it would seems that the federal court would have summarily ruled in their favor on the previous appeal. Aside from the merits of the case, the history does not augur well for Oracle.