Posts by mfalcon

Australia passes law to keep under-16s off social media – good luck with that, mate

Re: Australia's government counters ... many studies have shown social media is harmful to children

Seems to be a quite a bit of denial going on here. Once upon a time there were stories on TV about this or that doctor (always old) who was still telling patients that it was ok to smoke cigarettes. No one recommends giving a pack of cigarettes to a kid these days because the dangers are well understood. So it will be with social media too. Its just that some people will take longer that others to see the danger.

Have got start somewhere

All the people saying that it won't work are missing the point entirely. Its a start. People are slowing waking up to the fact that social media in its many forms has proven to be toxic and dangerous to children.

This law is the Australian Government's first attempt to address a real problem. It may fail but its at least a legal recognition is that action is required. In the long term doing nothing and saying its too hard is not an option.

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

Re: Valgrind?

The current batch of articles about the latest silver bullets that will get the industry a better place often completely miss the point that good design methodology and a well designed test framework are more important than the language you code in.

If programmers only start thinking about how to test their work toward the end of the project then it is already far too late. I write my unit tests in parallel to the code. This help refine my design and find errors. Win Win. Sure Rust and other safe languages will help with some classes of errors but there are lots of other errors where they make no difference.

The endless search for the next silver bullet is always doomed to in the long run. Valgrind is fabulous. If you can keep unit tests to a reasonable size then Valgrind being slow is usually not much of a problem.

A program designed to be testable will always be better than one where the programmer expected the implementation language to save them from mistakes.

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

A Culture GCU?

Perhaps its a Culture GCU getting bored and testing the capabilities of the locals with a bit of a mystery :-)

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Why am I running Unicos?

The obvious answer is because I can and old Cray's are just fundamentally cool. The slightly more practical reason is that since the Cray is a 64 bit machine that uses word memory addressing instead of byte addressing its C compiler has to be a bit special and so is a great platform to find unwise assumptions in a C code base.

Re: Admirable

I agree that WordPerfect was better for the production of documents, especially if a laser printer was to be involved and I did use it quite a bit for that. However if I was editing code or straight text I always went for something with WordStar control codes. As they say each to their own :-)

WordStar keyboard controls - if it ain't broke don't fix it

Started with WordStar on CP/M and later moved to MS-DOS. Borland wisely selected WordStar control keys for the Turbo-C integrated environment. Spent years using that. On Unix and Linux systems I use Vi for editing system files but Joe when coding or writing documents. At the start of the year I ran up a Cray supercomputer emulator running Unicos and compiled Joe for that. Thanks for the pointer to WordTsar I'll have a look at that.

Secure Boot useless on hundreds of PCs from major vendors after key leak

Re: The only thing worse than bad security

I'm not a security expert but am a long term user of Unix workstations, Unix servers, Linux, and Windows machines. My gut feeling has for a long time been that the complexity of UEFI and the growing number of theoretical and actual vulnerabilities of Secure Boot show that a lot of it is simply a bad idea. I never expected to have my suspicions proven so definitively.

I don't know what the solution moving forward is but continuing to assume that Secure Boot is the way to go surely must be seriously questioned.

FreeDOS and FreeBSD prove old code never dies, just gets nifty updates

Re: A graphical installer? Of all the pointless rubbish..

I use FreeBSD to provide a solid foundation for VirtualBox hosted VMs in my home setup. Bulk storage runs on ZFS mirrored hard disks and high speed storage is ZFS mirrored NVME drives. Backup is via rsync to ZFS snapshots on external hard drives which I rotate weekly.

For applications I use VMs running the OS with the apps I require. My Firefox instance runs on a Debian 12 VM because I found Firefox on FreeBSD to be a bit too unstable. For a GUI I use a FreeBSD VM running Mate and TigerVNC. I then connect to that from either from Windows with a VNC client or my newly built Raspberry PI machine also running FreeBSD and a VNC client.

The point is you can mix and match VMs to the problem you want to solve. One of the attractions of FreeBSD is that it doesn't suffer too much from the attention of well meaning but often clueless modern developers. For me it works and it works well.

Broadcom has willingly dug its VMware hole, says cloud CEO

VMware by Broadcom the IT world's Umbrella Corp

I watched the first Resident Evil movie the other night and was struck by the parallels between its Umbrella Corporation and VMware by Broadcom.

Some similarities include:

1. Immoral

2. Self serving

3. Oblivious to the damage they do

4. Believe they are smarter than they really are

On the positive side Umbrella's cartoonish evil is restricted to a fictional universe while VMware by Broadcom will do real damage in the real world to many an IT infrastructure all in the name of excess profits. How much coke and how many hookers does Broadcom hope to buy before the bulk of its customer base is gone?

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Vi and WordStar key commands are all I've ever needed

Late 50's former Unix admin now Linux admin here.

Having lived through the history described in the article I'd say that in recent years user interfaces have gone backwards in a big way. Just today I was struggling with Windows 11's minimalist interface where you can't clearly see the scrollbars anymore.

Modern Linux GUIs are equally bad. I refuse to touch Gnome 3. I've always blamed Apple for the current minimalist fad where you can't easily work out what parts of the interface are the active components.

I started editing text using WordStar on a Visual 1050 CP/M computer back in the mid eighties. Once I got my hands on a terminal connected to a Unix computer I learned the way of Vi. Having learned the key commands for these two programs I've never really had to learn anything else. This post was written using Joe.

In the MS-DOS world I used the Q editor and the Borland Turbo-C IDE both of which were very WordStar like.

For Unix and Linux sys admin I use Vi for editing system files and Joe for code.

When I have to use Microsoft Word I prefer to write the text using Joe and paste into Word, its just faster.

I access the Linux world via a VNC session into a MATE GUI configured with many virtual workspaces filled with xterm sessions, Firefox and RDP session or two.

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

Re: Linux - the dance party OS

To be clear its not that I don't like Linux, I've used it since I first installed it on a 486 in the 90s using 1.44 floppy disks. It is simply that as time goes by many Linux distros are going to places that I don't want to go.

Linux - the dance party OS

Professional sysadm here helping to admin a fleet of RHEL and Windows boxes running on VMware with some physical tin for a bit of extra flavour.

An older co-worker of mine once summed up Linux as "what happens when a bunch of people meet at a dance party and decide to write an operating system."

The beauty of FreeBSD is that by being less popular and sexy it mostly doesn't attract the types of "bright ideas" and enthusiastic but inexperienced developers that are trying to turn Linux into who knows what.

At home I use Windows for gaming and FreeBSD to run all kinds of VMs. The steady and unexciting pace of FreeBSD development is exactly what I want. For a GUI I run Mate on a FreeBSD VM and connect to it using VNC. Wayland need not apply. Other fun things include Solaris, NetBSD, OpenBSD and numerous other OSes including the Cray Unix Unicos.

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

Re: Archaic, and the problem is?

GUIs are a matter of taste. Personally I think the desire to make GUIs "pretty" has caused more trouble than anything else. I blame lots of people at Apple and Microsoft for the generally backward direction that GUIs have taken.

I use Mate these days and in the past used WindowMaker which was a good approximation of NextStep.

Forrester rates virtual machine infrastructure ‘stale or risky’

Self serving advice

Agreed.

I'd add that listening to self serving analysts or advice never ends well.

In the recent past we had a vendor tell us we should to be moving away from our obsolete data center infrastructure into their cloud. This was from a vendor rep who had never set foot inside said data centers.

We are using cloud services but only where it makes sense. Our data centers aren't obsolete either.

Fedora starts to simplify Linux graphics handling

Obi-Wan Kenobi said it best

Obi-Wan Kenobi said it best. It's your father's GUI. This is the tool of a System Administrator. Not as clumsy or as random as Gnome 3, but an elegant GUI for a more civilized age.

There are choices available for System Admins, you just won't find them in Fedora.

Re: Idiot Developers of Fedora don't want System Administrators to use their distro

I'm a professional system administrator. SSH is one of my major tools but day in day out I'm logged into a GUI environment. What am I doing in that GUI you ask? Launching large numbers of SSH sessions running in an xterm window to connect to the server fleet. Also I have a web browser open. Handy thing is the internet.

What GUI do I run? Mate running on VNC in a FreeBSD VM. For security all VNC traffic goes over a SSH tunnel. It works and it fast.

One of the other things I run is xfreerdp to talk to Windows boxen.

Lately I've started testing running Mate in a Debian docker container. Results so far are promising.

If necessary I can access this entire setup from home or anywhere else that a VPN can carry my SSH traffic.

I regard anything in the Gnome 3 line as not worth looking at. Same goes for Wayland. I need remote X capabilities. I know my use case is specialized but so what, it doesn't mean my requirements aren't real.

In the pursuit of looking pretty many modern Linux desktops are functionally a huge step backwards.

Netflix to crack down on account sharing, offer ad-laden cheaper options

A couple observations.

1. Maybe Netflix need to accept that endless growth in subscriber numbers is impossible.

2. To paraphrase Princess Leia - "The more you tighten your grip, Netflix, the more subscribers will slip through your fingers."

3. Netflix should never consider me "advertising tolerant."

4. I already have too many streaming subscriptions.

GNOME 42's inconsistent themes are causing drama

Lots of web designers should go up against the nearest wall

MATE just works. I run it on a tiny FreeBSD VM as part of my VNC setup. I then use a Raspberry Pi or TightVNC on my Windows boxen to display the desktop. Simple and fast it does everything I need.

There seem to be a generation of developers who have forgotten that some users just want stuff that works. I blame Apple for a lot of this stupidity but they aren't the only one responsible for the current mess. Lots of web designers should go up against the nearest wall.

Change of the sake of change has caused more harm to the usability of Linux than almost anything else.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Nothing new, kinda pathetic really

C survives and thrives because it solves many problems well or well enough. Developers of new languages crying about C and its problems doesn't win converts. Its kinda pathetic. If these new wonder languages are so good why do they need to define themselves by trying to prove how much better than C they are?

There is a lot to be said for solutions that work. In my work as a sysadmin I write lots of Bash scripts. Is Bash a great language? No. Is it the right tool for a lot of the work I'm doing, yes absolutely. The nice thing about shell script is that if I run into something too hard to do I can always write a bit of C and call it. Not necessarily pretty but it gets the job done. Language purity is for academic papers, not doing work in the real world. The real world is messy.

Facebook, Twitter, ordered not to spoil murder trial

Re: A prediction

Like it or not the "wild west" era of the Internet is comming to an end. The original poster is right. Once it becomes technically possible to do so governments will block the websites of companies that refuse to comply with their laws in order to enforce court orders.

The popularity of Facebook and twitter actually makes this outcome more likely. An obscure website publishing material that might damage a prosecution is one thing, when it is a very high profile website with millions users its quite another. Image the backlash against Facebook in Australia if the defence of the alleged murderer is able to convince the courts that he will not get a fair trial.

An alternative to blocking websites would be something like extradition treaties where the signatory countries would agree to inforce court orders across national boundaries where appropriate.

Just how good is Nokia's PureView 41Mp camera tech?

Re: "The best camera is the one you have with you"

Absolutly right. I have a nice Fuji Finepix which takes good pictures even if it is getting a bit old now. Since I got my N8 about 18th months ago just about every photo I've taken has been with it. The reason is simple. I carry my phone just about everywhere. I don't carry my camera everywhere.

HP must throw its PC biz overboard to survive, says analyst

Re: Wall Street in slash and Burn shocker.

The focus of many US businesses on short term profit is slowly but surely destroying the US economy. Businesses in many of other Western nations are also doing the same and have been for far too long.

Wall Street analysts like the guy responsible for this recommendation are only hastening the dominance of the Chinese economy. What will Western businesses do when they've sold and outsourced everything?

It sounds like HP needs to streamline it operations and business units. It doesn't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

C and Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie reported dead

His work certainly changed my life.

My development as a programmer went:

1. BASIC. Mostly Applesoft at high school.

2. Pascal. First language I learned at University. I was never much good at it.

3. Fortran. Second language I learned at University. Much more to my taste.

4. C. Third language I learned at University. I learned the basics in a weekend on a Pyramid 90x in the middle of 1986. Loved the language and have been using it ever since.

I've learned and used other languages since then but C is my favourite.

I'm currently a Unix/Linux system administrator but if ever asked I tell people that I'm really just a C programmer in disguise.

Its worth pointing out that C had a huge influence on hardware evolution. The developers of the various RISC CPUs optimised almost exclusively for C and Unix performance.

Sad news indeed.