Posts by BinkyTheMagicPaperclip

Classic MacOS for non-Apple PowerPC kit rediscovered

CHRP alternatives were all better than Apple kit

Depending on your viewpoint, but the alternatives both undercut Apple at the low end, and innovated more at the higher end. My understanding was that 8.0 wasn't very different to 7.6 but due to the clone manufacturers having iron clad contracts permitting them access to all 7.x releases, a sudden renumbering of the next 7.x point release stopped that dead. I've got 7.x, 8.x, and 9.x running on a 4400/200 here (plus the almost entirely useless BeOS PPC). There's a few games and applications that offer more interesting/different options on earlier OS releases.

On the non Apple front I do also have a quite rare PReP 43P, designed to run AIX. It may also be possible to get OS/2 PowerPC running on it with a lot of fiddling, but it really is alpha quality software, doesn't boot from a SCSI CDROM by default, and for IDE CD support the firmware only supports *one* specific model of Mitsumi CD drive. On the whole whilst booting from CD would be a novelty on a PC in 1995, this is a workstation that's considerably more hassle than any equivalent PC.

FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built

Also, thanks Liam, desktop-installer is new to me

First I've heard of it. Running labwc here, as I wanted a cwm equivalent under Wayland, and that's the closest functional compositor I could find that works under FreeBSD.

As mentioned above, VSCode does exist in freshports, although the port breaks from time to time which is a tad annoying.

Can't say I'm bothered about a Discord application - just run it in a browser. Remember that if you pass -P to Firefox it's possible to select different profiles, so they can be isolated either by purpose and by extension via network configuration (I have one browser straight onto the Internet, and another using a VPN via a SOCKS proxy. Browser themes then become actively useful, as I can set the theme to the flag of the country I'm connecting to the VPN).

I haven't got particularly strong feelings about how packages/base should be maintained other than to say that being able to easily wipe out your OS isn't a good idea, and that upgrading should be designed to be as quick and easy as using OpenBSD where it's as simple as a syspatch, sysupgrade, and pkg_add -u [1]plus there's no danger of bricking your system which there has been (or at least, stopping the console from working in certain configurations) when I had the temerity to try and skip over a minor release in FreeBSD without doing a pkg upgrade/update first.

[1] Someone previously said paraphrased 'but how do you know what the user wants to do?'. Really it is not difficult. If you're on RELEASE, upgrade to the next release. If you're on STABLE, it should go to the next stable. If it's on CURRENT, it should upgrade to the next CURRENT. It shouldn't be necessary to upgrade *any* package just to get base working.

Note also, that just like many Linux distributions, recovery when things go wrong is absolutely awful and often involves booting from install media and typing opaque CLI commands. Guess who hasn't needed to do that for years? Windows. Yes, Microsoft are a multi billion dollar corporation, but also FreeBSD has ZFS and could conceivably offer easier rollback or recovery.

Probably sticking with 14.3 for a while on the desktop, server may go to 15.0

I need GPU passthrough on the desktop, because FreeBSD - nice though it is at times, simply can't run a lot of Windows and Linux software[1][2]. Ran 15.0 and tried passthrough, it sort of worked on boot, but then I failed to get it working in Ubuntu, Mint, or Debian and I'm seeing a couple of funky bhyve behaviours I don't remember seeing in 14.x. I'll stick with 14.3 and apply the Corvin K patches until 15.0 is as usable.

The one difference I've noted so far is that it's trivial to set up a mirrored install, and a mirrored 'ZFS on root' setup will by default mirror swap using gmirror[3], but everything else (except the EFI partition) using ZFS, which is great because mirrored ZFS swap can apparently have issues in low memory situations, and setting up this configuration in 14.x needed to be done manually last time I tried.

Thinking about it, I might blow away and recreate my file/app server in 15.0 as it's currently on 13.5, is using mirrored ZFS swap I need to change, and I don't need to run desktop software on it.

Also pondering a second hand workstation so I can follow 16 CURRENT, and follow 15.0's third party patches for GPU passthrough.

[1] Don't get me wrong. 90% of the time FreeBSD does what I want - Firefox, Libreoffice, some scanning apps (although the OCR software I've tried so far is abysmal), and various terminal stuff. However the other 10% of the time is an issue.

[2] WINE does work under FreeBSD, but is unfortunately an order of magnitude behind Linux in terms of API coverage

[3] This breaks kernel dumps if it's important to you

Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch that refuses to die, just went fully open source

Re: Tempting! Bit square though..

I'm not seeing any great advantages here! Even my fairly low end 2016 car has Bluetooth, and can pair to a phone. I'd have to check if it actually displays the caller though, it's very basic and is the generation before Android Auto - which certainly would do what you want.

Tempting! Bit square though..

Haven't worn a watch for years, just use a phone instead.

Have to say if I bought a smart watch it'd probably be a Garmin. They have round bezels and physical buttons. Plus enough features to tell me what I already know - that if I want better running times I need to push myself harder.

Despite being very geeky by nature it just seems a step too far even if supporting open source hardware is tempting. Shades of having an actual watch form factor Game and Watch in the 80s when of course I was completely cool, and wouldn't want to return to that to overshade my former glory *cough*.

Is there anything it is really compelling for, when you already have a phone in your pocket?

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

There are other adventures too!

Worth checking out the yearly xyzzy awards for the best interactive fiction. The original Infocom adventures remain obtainable easily via the Internet, or some of them from GOG, and are still fun. I really need to finish completing Enchanter (which I enjoy far more than Zork) without accidentally releasing The Evil One and receiving a score of -1 'Menace to humanity' (I was quite proud of that).

Inform 7 for modern Z machine based games is.. ok. Personally I don't get on with the 'natural language' because you end up having to use very specific language to drive it. Instead I use Inform 6 (which Inform 7 compiles down to anyway), but also the PunyInform library which if you're careful about the limits also enables creating adventures for old 8 bit systems in addition to modern ones. If you're running a Z80 based system, Vezza is an excellent Z machine interpreter, and you can e.g. run pretty modern interactive fiction games on an Amstrad PCW.

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

Re: blackmail incoming

Or in fact Discord where they said your image was *not* stored, and then, um, the third party *did* store your image.

It's also worth looking at what the regulators actually do. People complain about Ofgem, but their remit is to keep the energy market stable, it's *not* to keep bills low (unless you're in a vulnerable group). Complain to your MP, and it all needs to be paid for somehow.

Although, yes, personally I'd rather the water industry remained privatised, we'd all had slightly higher bills, and we actually had new reservoirs in the last thirty years.

Bet the fines will go nowhere

Had a quick search, suspecting that Itai Tech Ltd would be an overseas company and Ofcom could go whistle for the fine.

Actually there is a UK based Itai Tech Ltd! However it is also in a state of 'Active proposal to strike off' according to Companies House, so Ofcom can still go whistle once they're wound up, I imagine.

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Re: sendmail.cf

Very wise. I wrote very custom offline mail routing rules in Sendmail under SCO Unix. Once.

Never again, thank you.

More recently I had a fiddle with exim filter rules after moving e-mail accounts. That's an awful lot better, but not exactly casual user friendly.

Retail giant Kingfisher rejects SAP ERP upgrade plan

Re: Its about time customers said "No" when vendors try to force everyone into SAAS relationships

Whilst in general I agree it really does depend on the service's purpose. If it's a word processor - fine, you could get away with using Wordstar from the 1980s for a lot of purposes, WordPerfect from slightly later if you need diagrams and tables. You can effectively argue things haven't moved forward enough/much, especially as Word still doesn't support tables in tables after 30+ years of development.

If the product is driven by a changing legislative landscape and customer requirements that don't stay the same over time, complete with hundreds or thousands of edge cases, interfaces to other systems, and interactions that need to result in a reliable result there's no real alternative to a subscription. In the 90s pre web it'd just be annual support and manual updates, rather than a web app or automatic updates, but the effect is the same.

I see your viewpoint, but no. By that stage we were already established. I'm not aware of any specific feedback that would have influenced the product, otherwise I would have mentioned it!

It helped bring in money. I'm sure as with every customer they will have highlighted interesting edge cases. The strategy back in those days was 'take the code base, adapt it to customer specifications, and worry about the future later'. That becomes a problem when you don't have a sensible mainline code base with nice neat branches, instead there's a sprawling mess of divergent code bases, and if it's an implementation that's not following the general direction of the product, any modification to bring it towards that becomes very expensive.

As the technical debt was slowly dealt with and everything brought back to One True Mainline (it mostly is now, except for the ones that aren't) they had the choice of moving to the mainline version (extra cost if they wish to keep their customisation), moving to a different product (more expensive), or leaving as Business deemed the support/development cost over income to be insufficient to continue supporting their bespoke implementation[1]. Especially so as after being taken over things were decidedly more corporate and structured - an improvement in a few areas, a disadvantage in many others.

Most of these customers got a very good deal and well over a decade of a supported environment, and advance notice of literal years that they had to make a choice - they did not do so badly. Many moved to the follow on product, or alternative products in the company group.

[1] You may reasonable ask the difference between this and SAP at this point. The differences are small vs a very large company, and the fact there is no such thing as a cheap SAP installation.

At one point we dealt with the now departed Kwik Save as a customer, a common negotiating point was 'we're going to have to sell a lot of tins of beans to pay for that'.

Retailers absolutely will throw lots of money at you *if* and only if you can show the value returned is substantially greater than their outlay. Business 101.

They also, shockingly, expect professionalism, the product to work, and support that does what it says on the tin. Who would have thought?

Unreasonable customers usually aren't too difficult to deal with except in the short term, anyone trying to exceed their contract will eventually go back to negotiation at a business level and change requests to fix their requirements - or to be asked to leave. It's the *reasonable* customers who expect the product to do exactly what it should, when it fundamentally doesn't, that are the problem - or when the contracts team gets eaten alive by retailers who are very good at negotiating and the contracts team or management look only at the headline rate, and not at the ongoing cost.

The only exception are smaller companies who frankly received a bargain, and then in future years are unwilling to pay a reasonable market rate, not one influenced by unnecessary cloud architectures or poor business decisions. in those cases, well, they'd better try and find another company who will sell a solution at below the going rate, pony up the market rate cash, or move to a standardised product with no customisation.

It's not rocket science

Similar issues at work. Much of my area gained popularity because we provided a decent product at a reasonable price with a lot of per customer customisations.

This is expensive to maintain, however, and unless you're very strict with your development process (and we weren't, making the business over clean architecture trade off) it leads to sprawling technical debt. But hey, the company prospered because of it, so not a bad business decision.

Then we got taken over aaaaand innovation stopped. Then the next step was trying to push customers to the newer platform which was more expensive, and overall less functional (did some things much better, others somewhat worse). 'Surprisingly' this is not a selling point.

If you want the big companies you're going to have to support customisation, and put in the resource to support it. They will take some pain when the platform evolves, as they're not completely unreasonable, but a huge price spike which boils down to 'we want more money and less hassle' will just lead to them looking elsewhere.

There seems to be the repeated expectation/hope by various management that there is a Sunshine and Unicorns marketplace where companies will pay through the nose for whatever you provide. Providing solutions at this level is inherently messy to your Ideal Architecture (although a degree of that is normally because providers under quote and don't factor in proper training and documentation, which are mandatory for long term support and platform stability)

If you're going to effectively ask the customer to re-buy their entire solution, the likelihood is you'll do it repeatedly. Why bother sticking with a company like that, when you can try another company that may be more competent - or at least more reasonably priced.

EU's reforms of GDPR, AI slated by privacy activists for 'playing into Big Tech’s hands'

Might as well keep it now

Largely the GDPR isn't that useful - the responsible companies comply with it, and the irresponsible ones flout the law and have very few consequences.

However, seeing as most decent companies have changed all their systems to cope with it, might as well keep it now.

Additionally it will *really annoy Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and a whole load of other tech bros* as they have to dedicate legal and technical resources, after they break the rules for the fifth time.

For that reason alone, we should keep it.

Here's one way to cut support ticket volume… send them to another company entirely

Not really a surprise

We've had more than one customer think anything vaguely web or network based means the request should be sent to us, and they quickly get redirected to their internal support or ISP.

Fortunately there's no 'AI' here yet, other than an initial automated response e-mail, but it's probably just a matter of time. There's enough mistakes made in responses using humans, I shudder to think what will happen if an LLM starts to construct confident sounding but wrong answers.

If a human tells the customer to delete all their data for the last month and it'll be OK, they can get sacked. How are you going to tell off an LLM when it's backed into a corner and spews out any old rubbish?

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

Absolutely, you're clearly correct. The only possibility is OpenBSD.

Transparent. Aims are clear. Absolutely zero tolerance to closed source blobs or code. Willing to surgically and mercilessly strip out anything that gets in the way of its aims.

You surely didn't mean that *other* Finn based unix, which is hopelessly taken over by corporate interests, and accepts opaque binary blobs into its browser in order to play protected content video did you? That would be quite laughable.

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

Re: Solution for low salaries in gov IT

My wording could have been better. The BSDs are especially poor. OpenBSD *one year*. FreeBSD five years - but only if you run STABLE which is a pain as it needs to be built from source. If RELEASE is used, you'll be upgrading every year. Five years for Ubuntu LTS is significantly less than the effective 11 years for Windows 10 at no additional cost, and somewhat longer than that depending on the version (effectively 13 years for standard Windows 10, if you're running LTSC IoT versions support extends out to 2032, but you'd have to determinedly update to that version, I'm not sure how viable that is from standard 10).

Windows has only started the hardware crackdown with Windows 11 - I'm still on 10, my main system being very good for 2013. It would also run Windows 11 if I bypassed the hardware check requirements, but why bother?

Commercial Unix licensing pricing isn't one of my areas of expertise - I note that Ubuntu are actually very generous for non commercial users, with Pro available free for up to five PCs. It is, yes, much cheaper than a Windows Enterprise license.

Re: Solution for low salaries in gov IT

To be fair, not exactly. There is no such thing as 'fixing it once and for all with open source software'[1]. All software has a lifecycle. Most commercial Unix has a shorter lifecycle than Windows. Most commercially free Unix has a *much* shorter lifecycle than Windows (not infrequently well under a couple of years before an upgrade to maintain security patches is required, which is ridiculous from a commercial point of view, but the cost is *free*).

For open source, you have as it says 'all the source'. If you want to maintain a Unix distribution at a specific version for thirty years you can, but it requires expense and expertise.

Either pay for moderately specialist expertise that can't necessarily be swapped in by any available warm body[2]

or

Pay for a product backed by a commercial entity where they provide the back to back support, SLAs and suchlike, but you're beholden to their support lifecycle (or you pay more and experience issues over time[3])

Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and different costs at varying times. It can be understood why a company might prefer to minimise the amount of staff dedicated to their specific environment, and maximise those who can be quickly sourced.

[1] For the 'Captain picky' among commentators. Yes, if your task is disconnected from the network and you can reasonably expect long term hardware support then *maybe* you can have a setup and forget system, but these are increasingly rare.

[2] This is rather unfair on various admins, it too is increasingly specialist regardless of whether it is Windows, Commercial Unix or other applications. The general principle of 'I want someone trained in these specific products and versions' is easier to source than 'I need people who have all these skills and can then adapt to our specific configuration' holds, though. Note also that if you're doing the latter, you'd better pay them well, because where are the transferable skills? Who would willingly sign up to a job that will actively erode your exposure to new technologies over time?

[3] At work we probably have/had fifteen plus year old implementations. They still work and receive security patches, but any new functionality became increasingly expensive as backporting from the mainline becomes difficult due to divergence of architecture, plus also developers want to move on, and institutional knowledge is lost.

Re: Ha, ha, ha

You can blame Microsoft for a whole host of things, including increasing spyware, unwanted LLMs, almost mandatory cloud accounts, and unnecessarily dropping support for hardware perfectly capable of running Windows 11 if they made the effort.

What you can't do, however, is blame them for the longevity of support and the notification of support lifecycle. It's typically better than anything else on the market, including commercial Unixes, and comically better than free Unixes.

Even with an inept company and hideously slow internal bureaucracy it's still an acceptable amount of time for all but the most tardy.

Re: Solution for low salaries in gov IT

I think based on your very own response they understand it perfectly well.

Why push extra risk onto yourself when you can charge a stupendous amount, earn a ridiculous profit, and lock people in. Then when the commercial offering goes out of support, they get to buy it all again! win win!

Rust Foundation tries to stop maintainers corroding

Re: Something isn't right

You're correct that it's voluntary, and development is no different from any other demanding volunteer job. Have a bit of compassion though, especially when you're enmeshed in a community it can be difficult to say no, and many communities actively make it difficult to say no - mostly because there are *always* more demands than volunteers.

If everyone was sensible and had incredibly healthy balance between volunteering and personal time vast numbers of projects would collapse. This may admittedly be a good thing, at least for the volunteers, and to make it crystal clear to the general community they're taking people for a ride.

Companies hiring their own devs may help a little, but they will naturally only contribute to the areas that suits the company; most of them aren't going to develop functionality that doesn't benefit them, or worse, benefits a competitor. A lot of Linux is already developed by full time salaried employees, and the end result is pursuing the viewpoint of the company, and neglecting contrary viewpoints (look at Wayland, now look at which bits *actively* considered BSD, or even seriously explored notable edge cases other than the one of 'we don't want to develop Xorg any more').

Also, yes, funding should not be limited to developers. All the other necessary roles involve effort too; in fact in some ways they're worse than development because at least there's a tangible product at the end that can be shown to people. As usual other people aren't as likely to be as impressed if contributions aren't as obvious.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Re: Unions

That's nice for you. Other people have responsibilities and hobbies outside computers. Children. Parents. Staying fit. Healthcare issues. Chores.

I do a considerable amount of computer related coding/sysadmin/fettling outside work, but it's *different* IT. No-one is going to want to pay me lots of money for fiddling with systems from the 80s and 90s, or for most of the Unix tweaking I'm doing. Also, I'm not sure if I did this as a job if I'd find it irritating even more so than my current job, thirty plus year old Unix utilities and the only way to understand how they work properly is still to dive into the source code. I just *love* having my personal time wasted like this, but I'm stubborn enough to want to learn and to provide some documentation once I do understand it.

Postcode Lottery's lucky dip turns into data slip as players draw each other's info

Re: Someone's Knocking At The Door...

Great... now I've got Rod Hull and an irritating puppet in my head..

'17 minutes'

Might do to dig slightly deeper ElReg, '17 minutes' were what People's lottery reported, wasn't it?

Idle look at the forums in-between waiting for customers and mild losing the will to live :

angryoldgit 10:59 First post.

SURREYDAVE 13:42 'Same here — I experienced the exact same issue. I called them to report it, but they said they were already aware of the problem.'

MouldyOldDough 15:44 'The site is still up and running with no reports or warnings ! '

but finally

marcia_ 16:06 'It's showing an application error when i try and log on so they are working on it '

Still, although I personally feel the People's Lottery is even more of a waste of time than the National Lottery (which I do play at times, because a bit of hope is fun, and the opportunity cost is pretty low), at least they did actually address it, such are the low standards of the rest of the industry

This security hole can crash billions of Chromium browsers, and Google hasn't patched it yet

Re: How about Brave get off their arses and write some code

Good reminder, but I'm using Firefox, not Brave

How about Brave get off their arses and write some code

They're a commercial company making millions of pounds a year. Get off your arses, be responsible, and fix the problem without depending on Google.

The CAPITAL LETTERS trick that helped merge Windows 95 into NT

Sourcesafe isn't reliable when performing operations on many files, and worse it won't tell you about failures. It doesn't have atomic commits either. So overall it's an absolute disaster.

SLM was new to me, but if you have a quick search you'll find more detail about it and its brief commercial offshoot Microsoft Delta. One key difference is that SLM can manage large software products, whilst Sourcesafe can't.

Microsoft then moved on to Source Depot which is modified Perforce. Perforce is a solid SCM, and it's still used at work. We've had very few issues with it. (Other projects use Team Foundation or Git, but it would take too much effort to be worth shifting the codebase inside Perforce elsewhere.

Ubuntu Unity hanging by a thread as wunderkind maintainer gets busy with life

Succession planning, it's a thing

Good on Saraswat for setting boundaries. We're all going to get older (or worse : not) and have life changes, it's important to have succession planning for anything important from early on. Naturally of course everyone will do the typical human thing of leaving it *beyond the last minute* even after being told that the person is moving on.

There appear to be only two developers (including Saraswat) involved with Ubuntu Unity, it's rather off to let all this fall on the shoulders of a 10-15 year old. It's not on to stick this on the shoulders of a single adult, either, which is likely to be the result if they find a schmuck stupid enough to take this on.

It's not just community flavours of Linux distributions, so much of open source is in a string and sealing wax situation. I know there is a limit what can be expected for free, but there are literally multiple parts of Unix that haven't been significantly re-engineered in thirty plus years, and even in the 80s would have been considered barely passable compared to competent commercial engineering. For all the billions of people using it, there's very little free resource.

Stick a donation link on the project page, and *pay* people to do it too.

Zen Internet loses unfair dismissal appeal case with former CEO

Re: Pointless growth attempt

Pretty much exactly the route I took. Various dialups, then Zetnet (no longer exists) for ISDN dialup, moved to Zen as they were cheaper for a better service, stayed on an unlimited 512Kb/s ADSL service for a *long* time rather than move to a faster limited service, eventually shifted to ADSL MAX and Be, then taken over by Sky, got fed up with them and moved to A&A.

A&A are expensive and they have usage limits on some of the tarrifs, but at 1TB a month I rarely get even vaguely close to them, and you get IPV6 that works[1] plus decent support.

[1] When I finally get around to setting up a redundant IPV6 connection.

BBC probe finds AI chatbots mangle nearly half of news summaries

Even when it doesn't hallucinate, it's a problem

I had someone ask about a particular issue, and referred to some documentation that looked to be related to documentation I'd written but was a bit odd. So I asked where it was from

'oh, I ran your documentation through an LLM' - because they thought reading a summary was sufficient.

No, I wrote the documentation that way for a reason, you need to read all of it. It was only about five pages long, not War and Peace.

The joys of something that promises to save effort and instead wastes the time of at least two different people instead.

Everybody's warning about critical Windows Server WSUS bug exploits ... but Microsoft's mum

There wasn't any valid reason in 2002 either..

Been a while since I maintained WSUS, would have been up to 2010 at the latest but it was never exposed to the Internet. Neither was any other domain service.

You could sort of get away with less than optimal security configuration until the late 90s, after that you took your life into your hands. I miss some of the sysadmin side, I definitely don't miss securing networks - complex, difficult, and thankless.

OpenBSD 7.8 out now, and you're not seeing double, 9front releases 'Release'

Re: Have never upgraded OpenBSD

You do know about CARP? That way you could have a pair of OpenBSD firewalls, upgrade them one at a time and have the other one take over duties whilst one upgrades. Leave it a couple of days between upgrading both if you're paranoid, and if it isn't working properly, fail over to the older one, and re-install/diagnose the new.

Time to go for an upgrade!

OpenBSD is the one system I'd be happy to run -current on, and upgrades have pretty much always been trouble free.

You can get serial to 3.3V USB adapters, with connectors that attach to individual pins for GPIO devices, if you must use a Pi. Do note the Pi's USB ports aren't up to spec either, with something like 1.2-1.5A (depending on the Pi) shared across *all* USB ports regardless of the amperage of your PSU.

FreeBSD. Yeahhh... Recently tried to upgrade from 14.1, to 14.2, to 14.3 without doing a pkg upgrade in 14.2 because why would you need to, *surely* as freebsd-update is upgrading base, you can run pkg upgrade once you reach 14.3? Bad idea, it broke the boot[1], had to revert to the saved older kernel. Also note that you may need to manually remove the drm kmods and firmware because the repositories have now split between packages and drm, which is a good idea, but not when it stops X/Wayland working because the system didn't automatically sort the packages for you.

[1] Probably GPU firmware related. Whilst it was a good idea to split DRM kmods into another repository, it should be updated automatically by a separate program or the install program should automatically run a mandatory pkg upgrade against the kmods repository. OpenBSD runs fwupdate automatically, it's not linked into pkg_add, because they actually think things like this through.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Impossible error in DOS

In the early 90s I received an 'impossible error' in a DOS program. It was a very flaky PC, and I suspect the memory was bad with certain bits wired to specific values, so in addition to a lot of instability 'an impossible error has occurred!' in fact occurred.

There's a reason in space with all the cosmic radiation, there are multiple computers cross checking results! Even at ground level you'll get parity/ECC correction notes occasionally.

Hundreds of orgs urge Microsoft: don’t kill off free Windows 10 updates

Nice idea, but no

Given Microsoft have already deprecated various CPUs, and could very easily have taken the more palatable option of only enabling enhanced security features [1] on CPUs that could handle it, but haven't done so, the idea they'll be nice at this stage is laughable. You're only complaining *now* when it finally starts to be an issue you can't ignore, rather than literally years ago when this was obvious the way it would go?

Nothing will get in the way of forced obsolescence.

Well, nothing but using and *paying* (by donating for future upkeep) a similar amount as a retail copy of Windows to open source alternatives.

[1] enhanced security features that have stopped just how many exploits on Windows 11? If it's so much more secure, Microsoft would have been shouting about it, and other than guff about 'our architecture is so much better because shut up it is' I'm not seeing notable instances of articles saying 'we had to do a really complex workaround for Windows 10, but in Windows 11 we had to do nothing'

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Re: This is a nonsense

I will freely admit that I voted for Labour in the absence of any other sensible option, and they're spectacularly shooting their own feet.

However do note, not that it makes it right in any way whatsoever, the Tories were worse, there were screams of general election and *naff all happened*. The Tories won a landslide in 2019 despite everyone knowing exactly what sort of person Johnson was if they'd spent even five minutes to look. The only thing that started heavily shifting polls in Labour's direction was the massive increase in energy bills, and the general cost of living on top of that. Other things nudged the direction a bit, but nothing else really shifted the needle.

Hopefully they can start to see sense, because whilst Labour are turning out to be a spectacular disappointment, the thought of Reform or the Tories again is just horrific.

But hey, it's OK, 70% of people voted to keep FPTP two referendums ago, so we're all screwed.

Solar flair: Logitech's K980 Signature Slim keyboard runs on rays

Logitech are so boring these days, can't they target real gaps in the market?

Yet Another rather flimsy Bluetooth keyboard isn't really any sort of innovation. What would actually pique my interest would include :

A mini, or even slightly larger Bluetooth keyboard with included trackpoint or trackpad that has no latency issues. K400, but Bluetooth, please!

A *supported* dongle with HID proxy support, so Bluetooth can be used on system boot. It is possible to find solutions to do this, but it's a pain, requires end user effort, and the manufacturers really don't want end users doing it. Release a product that is supported. Or even a keyboard that dynamically switches between 2.4G on bootup and Bluetooth once the OS has booted, so it works in both the BIOS and once booted with no user intervention.

A re-release/evolution of the G13 Gamepad. It's a lovely option if you're using a non QWERTY keyboard. Azeron have created some interesting alternatives, but they really do push the looks into the gamer territory.

Or, and I can dream, a new five button mouse and/or trackball that supports PS/2. Yes, I know it's legacy, but there's a lot of KVMs and old systems out there too and PS/2 devices more easily adapt to USB than the other way around. Even with the HIDMan, which works almost flawlessly with keyboards, mouse support is a bit more spotty.

Logitech are so unfeasibly safe, boring, and not particularly inexpensive these days. The most interesting products they have are the trackball based systems.

No other weird mice or experimental keyboards. They have mechanical keyboards but don't seem to support remapping. No sophisticated remote controls any more. A new controller that is a clear and mostly poor rip off of Elgato's offerings at lacklustre value for money.

You can keep backlighting. The RGB options of my keyboard are kept firmly off. Backlighting is vaguely useful for phones, but I'm not seeing the point for a full size PC keyboard.

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

Joe, this is truly awful article

I went and started to read the Owl study and found out to my surprise it's actually quite interesting, and the Reg article is rather misleading. Headlines that stand out include :

It's not that 'employees understand the company's point of view' - that's putting words in their mouth. It's why employees think the RTO mandate is being enacted.

It's notable that 'quiet quitting' is far more prevalent among in office workers, and especially amongst managers.

Also that remote work tech, including video conferencing, works for the vast majority of people

As far as I can see in the main the study *supports* remote working.

I'm still on practically 100% remote working, and it would be utterly pointless to order me to RTO given the remainder of my team are in different countries, a different hemisphere, and in the near future offshoring some functions 5,000 miles away. The tech works absolutely fine, when collaboration falls down it's due to trying to repeatedly half arse organisation and documentation, and instead rely on grabbing people either online or in person.

In person has some very minor benefits if you can physically accost a person when they're not answering electronic communication, but the correct response is to get them to respond to their electronic prompts over email, Teams, or other internal systems.

The top things work, and many other businesses, could do to improve productivity would be to reduce expenditure on offices and instead spend the saving on new employees to slash bureaucracy to the absolute minimum, and professionally write, organise, and otherwise curate documentation and training.

OpenSSF warns that open source infrastructure doesn't run on thoughts and prayers

Re: Contribute.

If you're working in security, reach out to them, maybe you're applicable.

Otherwise, same as any other open source project. First you remind everyone that it is free is in speech, not as in beer, and include a prominent link for donations and subscriptions.

Then you progress this by charging for consultancy, timely fixing of defects, and quoting for enhancements.

If it's still not working then the question is why you're creating open source in the first place; you've got a day job that pays so presumably you want to give something back to the community? If the reward (monetary, satisfaction, recognition, whatever) doesn't match your effort, then either stop or fork it to closed source and see if the market wants to fund you to continue.

If you use it, pay for it

To echo what Tim and others are saying above : if you use it, pay for it.

I may complain about FreeBSD but it has been my primary browsing box for upwards of three years now, and I've two permanent home servers providing services. OpenBSD has been my firewalling solution at home (and occasionally used at work) for fifteen years at least.

End result : I contribute to each every year roughly to the tune of what it would cost for a retail copy of Windows. I'll be doing the same for server or free software I continue use on a consistent basis, where being funded is appropriate.

It's going to be interesting what happens at companies, though. Unless it's very heavily used the question arises whether any cost can be justified. I couldn't justify faffing with bureaucracy and possible costs at work to be able to use MiKTeX, Cygwin, or possibly even gvim - I'd probably just waste time and effort using Word, Powershell, and then stew about having to use Notepad++ or similar.

The question is how many companies will pay, and how many will do the right thing and run a local, verified repository to reduce requirements, and provide increased protection and reliability in their own supply chain.

Based on pricing, it also raises the question of third parties setting up competing repositories, which is unlikely to be a desirable result!

This isn't quite the same thing. This is providing a service for free on the grounds of reasonable usage where usage has grown beyond reasonable limits.

It's not really even an open source issue, it's a resourcing issue. Remember the early days of Kindle 3G devices where not only could it download your books, but it had an experimental, slow ability to browse the web for free?

People quickly worked out the reason for this was the embedded unlimited 3G SIM. This was noted by the wiser members of the general hacking community with the proviso that they weren't going to provide instructions on how to tether this or similar, and do not take the piss because there will be consequences.

Guess what? Selfish idiots took the piss because free Internet, innit? Let's tether this to my laptop and download many megabytes.

End result, Amazon first started restricting it, and eventually removed the capability to do anything other than download books. Where people could previously do some very light web browsing and checking of webmail when away from home or on holiday, now they couldn't. Slow clap, everyone lost.

This missive from OpenSSF is one of the more notable proper warnings to not take the piss. If enough responsible companies and individuals step up to fund services properly, things will carry on as before. Otherwise Step Two begins : throttling, banning, and the introduction of Step 3 : authenticated, tiered chargeable access

I'm out, says OpenSUSE: We're dropping bcachefs support from next kernel version

Yes, that's what should happen for experimental filesystems. News at 10.

Even bcachefs' author admits this in some vaguely weasel words in the FAQ about suitability for Production

"Bcachefs can currently be considered beta quality. It has a small pool of outside users and has been stable for quite some time now; there's no reason to expect issues as long as you stick to the currently supported feature set."

That's not an unequivocal yes, and until it has gone beyond a small pool of outside users to be more widespread it can't be considered to be battle tested. There are always edge cases, and it won't have found all of them as has been seen in the recent proposed changes that drew Linus' ire.

Compile it as a module or stick it through FUSE. Don't use it for your root file system. Keep frequent backups. Just like any other new and unproven filesystem.

When it's been proven more, it can be added back into the kernel.

Bloody Linux and the 'I must have new shiny *now* even if it inconveniences other people' attitude

Re: Have you ever heard of NTFS?

The point is that NTFS is not in the kernel. It's a driver that runs at kernel level, there is a difference.

There is support for a limited number of filesystems in the bootloader, and both NTFS and ReFS are among them[1]. You can run Windows entirely from ReFS if you wish.

[1] So if you want to go 'well akshually' then yes, the bootloader is effectively the kernel at that point, and there is enough NTFS code to load the kernel and subsequently the filesystem driver at that point, but that's not really a full implementation 'in the kernel'

FreeBSD Project isn't ready to let AI commit code just yet

Re: A big mistake, this

I would say it is entirely sensible, if FreeBSD *must* continue their current scheme, to assume upgrading to the next point release of the current branch, and the following release (one louder) in that branch if not.

If point releases must remain, a system is on 13.3, and up to 13.5 is available it upgrades to the next point release. At that point if you wish to explicitly jump ahead I'd accept parameterising that is a good idea. It should be the least effort, and the least surprise.

Personally I'd use OpenBSD as a model[2], it has sane defaults. Junk point releases entirely, stick changes in a patch or push anything else to the next major release. Just 13.0, no .1 though .5. If it's a security or particularly important issue, it's a patch, otherwise the functionality goes in the next major release. Heck, OpenBSD is the *only* operating system I would be comfortable running on -current.

Junking point releases would (should) also lead to longer support, particularly for pkg, whereas at the moment it's necessary to upgrade point releases in relatively short time frames[3]. Here, I'm holding FreeBSD to a higher standard than OpenBSD, because OpenBSD is largely rather useful with just the utilities in base and FreeBSD.. isn't[1]. FreeBSD I expect to run more servers and make an attempt at being a desktop environment, and the fact without fiddling around it's necessary to upgrade point releases uncomfortably often and then run the risk a pkg upgrade breaks something is unpleasant.

I do like FreeBSD when it works well - recently I've used jails to maintain multiple instances of Unbound and it's far cleaner than any other solution I could devise, but it also rather frequently annoys the snot out of me by assuming knowledge or not using sane defaults.

[1] Sure, you could undoubtedly just use it as a firewall, but then why bother : there's OpenBSD that's explicitly designed to do that.

[2] I will concede that OpenBSD's support cycle is not long either, but because the way I find to use it reliably is to stick to base functionality, and because release upgrades are with very few exceptions extremely reliable it fills me with far less trepidation than a FreeBSD update.

[3] I'm sure there's ways around this by maintaining your own repository and frequent compiles from STABLE or whatever, but this is yet more hassle that shouldn't be necessary.

Re: A big mistake, this

If it adds speed and reduces complexity I'm all for it, but to handle upgrades pkg would naturally have to be extended to specifically handle upgrades, because you wouldn't want to accidentally update base. Although, I've had pkg upgrades badly and repeatedly break functionality so maybe it won't make a difference[1].

Release upgrading :

Windows : click button. Wait some time. Hope it's doing something. Carry on.

OpenBSD : Run syspatch, grab a biscuit. Run Sysupgrade, grab a cup of tea. Run pkg_add -u. Have another cuppa. Done.

FreeBSD : Run freebsd-update fetch. Wait. Run freebsd-update install. Wait some more whilst it fannies around printing numbers on the console. Run freebsd-update -r <have to manually stick in appropriate version *even if there is only one reasonable option*> upgrade. Wait what seems an interminably long time. Say y to prompt and screenfulls of text you will never read. Run freebsd-update install. Reboot. Run freebsd-update install again. Run pkg upgrade.

[1] Upgrading to 14.3 and having DRM move to its own repository. Except you have to manually remove the old DRM components and pkg install them back in again (where it adds from the new repository) otherwise it breaks X/Wayland. Nice idea, poor implementation. Having WINE break *again*, or Firefox have issues. Upgrading a package, FreeBSD seems to enforce everything being updated, KEA DHCP server gets updated, new version enforces different (more logical) directory layout to the old version, service fails to start. I like FreeBSD, but it is at those moments I consider it too often gets in the way of Actually Achieving Stuff.

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

Re: Definite popcorn moment

Missing the reference, sadly? Sure, I realise my response is a bit or a lot 'Well akshually' but y'know there's

'fine-tooth comb', 'tooth-comb' and 'A toothcomb (also called a tooth comb or dental comb) is a dental structure found in some mammals, comprising a group of front teeth arranged in a manner that facilitates grooming'.

So, yeah, 'fine toothcomb' is technically wrong by the dictionary, got me, mea culpa but it is non rare usage, language is messy. A toothcomb does exist however. Every day is a school day.

Re: Definite popcorn moment

Please check both the OED and Wikipedia (although I will grant the OED seems to accept 'tooth-comb', not 'toothcomb')

Definite popcorn moment

Unlike the AT&T situation, which looks like it boils down to poorly thought out contracts, I would be very surprised if Tesco haven't gone over their contract with a fine toothcomb.

Expecting this one to swing the way of Tesco, and end up with a private settlement to Broadcom's disadvantage, followed by a slow migration to another product.

Microsoft readies Windows 11 25H2 while Windows 10 circles the drain

Signing up for a year of extra support, then moving to FreeBSD with Linux/Windows in VMs

Work laptop runs whatever work dictate - which is currently Windows 11.

Main personal browsing and productivity box has been a fanless Wyse box running FreeBSD for at least two years. FreeBSD can be irritating at times, but it's basically working.

Lounge couch gaming PC is running 10, pondering dual boot to Bazzite Linux, see if it can replace Windows (probably not, I have a Rift CV1 and a PSVR2 and they're very Windows oriented)

More powerful workstation (not used very often, basically for gaming and high end virtualisation) is on 10. Going to get another year's support and see if I can move it to FreeBSD with bhyve VMs for Linux and Windows for things FreeBSD can't handle and finally make the switch. Without *some* pain I'll never entirely switch.

I do note that Oasis for Steam is now out, allowing for Window Mixed Reality headsets to run both on 11 and 10, meaning they're no longer bricked by Microsoft discontinuing support. Does require an Nvidia GPU, but that's the only realistic option for VR anyway. Wonder if it runs under WINE.. presume not, but maybe it will soon!

Re: Corporate world

Windows 11 has been in use at work for at least two years here. Largely its been painless. Disappearing taskbar icons took a long time to be fixed but I can't remember it being broken for months now.

Virtual desktops are still absolutely awful. Programs will frequently open on the desktop you don't want them to, and switching of desktops without using hotkeys is horrifically slow. Can't stand the updated Notepad.