Posts by BinkyTheMagicPaperclip 1707 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2012
Sure, perhaps the gameplay does change, but every week? The need to wait for app approvals is a known quantity. Ship in the new code ahead of time, activate it on a given date.
The 'need' to ship an update every week seems to me to be for their convenience, not an absolute necessity.
I'd mostly side with Epic here, but from Tim Sweeney
'Our release planning relies on platforms supporting app developers like us releasing apps. There is no way a rapidly evolving multi-platform game like Fortnite can operate if platforms use their power or processes to obstruct.'
oh bugger off! If your app *needs* to be updated that regularly your architecture is shit. Content updates should be applied through data, not executable code.
Just another example of awful modern development processes where medium to long term planning is shelved based on the knowledge any issues can be fixed with a mandatory regular release.
Still, that's about standard for Epic. Fortnite may be very successful, and Unreal Engine is doing very well, but despite all the free games being given away epic games store front is still a very poor alternative to GOG, never mind Steam, six years on.
You make *some* good points, I particularly enjoyed 'It’s like being handed a squirt gun and told you’re part of the fire brigade.'
The problem is you're seeing it as a conspiracy rather than an ongoing effort of problematic companies to work around the rules due to both some abiguity and more importantly the enforcement organisations being under resourced. This isn't new. See also 'the gig economy' and most recently in the UK heated tobacco products advertising, which is a great example.
Heated tobacco products. Without wishing to be sued, what can be said is that it is clearly a product that is unhealthy for the consumer. You could probably reasonably call its existence evil, as it's more harmful than vaping (but less so than burned tobacco). Trading standards' position is that advertising this is banned, but this has not been tested in court because they are under resourced. So some adverts for it have been running. The resolution to this is the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, currently grinding its way through the parliamentary process.
The point of this? Legislation is a long, slow, error prone process, and many entities that stand to make money could try to abuse it.
If GDPR formalised data exploitation this would imply: What existed prior to GDPR was better - this is very clearly not the case, even if personally I feel the utterly bullshit popups ruined the web. Post GDPR companies are able to more easily harvest data, with the correct legal trickery. Based on your specific posts, that many/all companies are salivating at the prospect of abusing customer data
Prior to the GDPR Facebook had the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The GDPR, if anything, helped to some degree in preventing *that specific class* of misuse reoccurring.
Having implemented GDPR data cleaning for a product in a company that contains large amounts of personal data I can tell you that as Gordon alluded to, we do the best we can. I took the best care I could to clear down the maximum amount of data whilst keeping the system operational. We don't use customer data for any purpose other than the system defines, there's mandatory training on appropriate use of data and reporting for its misuse, and there have never been any conversations on using data for purposes which would be useful to the business but not related to functionality based on the products on offer.
That is for an EU based company though. Let's just say if I worked for a US company I wouldn't trust many of them to uphold those standards.
I wouldn't primarily blame the laws. I would take a closer look at the amount of funding, enforcement, and deals done at compliance organisations. Are they adequately funded? When there is a breach is it enforced? When it is enforced, is the scale of enforcement appropriate?
I have to admit I'm nitpicking here, but you're confusing Facebook and Meta.
Most people haven't bought anything from Facebook aside from advertisers, commercial companies, those people who want to boost their posts (well, that's basically advertising under another name), and presumably the users of the horrific Facebook for Business I refused to use when work implemented it years ago (they've since been taken over and dumped FfB).
Has anyone bought anything from Meta? Yes, yes they have. There's an entire VR division and they've created at least eight VR headsets (CV1, S, Quest 1-3, 3S, Go, Quest Pro). Meta may also have wasted a vast amount of money trying to get everyone to live and interact in VR when that's not what people want to use VR for, but that's beside the point.
That's a blast from the past! Had forgotten about Multiplan and I've never even heard of Microsoft Game Shop or Kid Pix - some searching may happen in a bit. I don't remember seeing it in the 'absolutely everything, ever' MSDN we had years ago.
Also reminds me of the PTSD of dealing with all the horrid old file based mail 'servers'. Microsoft Mail was especially poor, but cc:Mail wasn't that much better. No matter what you might think about Exchange even the earliest versions were generally an order of magnitude improvement over MS Mail. The days when the Internet hadn't quite made it big, X.400 seemed like it had a chance of being the messaging behemoth, then dialup became a thing for most households and SMTP steamrollered everything. I'd rather write a sendmail.cf by hand again, than have to deal with MS Mail.
OpenBSD instead tends to use doas, which completely threw away the tens of thousands of lines of sudo code and wrote an alternative (in C) to handle the case of running one command as another user, which is what people use sudo for most of the time.
Seems to me using the Unix philosophy, it'd be better to use a set of smaller commands that are easy to audit the code for, than maintain one bloated codebase with functionality that frequently goes unused by most people.
It's largely useless, of course, but just strengthens NetBSD's hacker OS credentials.
I would *not* use it as a daily driver - been there, tried that, ran away. However, as a target for hacking, or for creating an embedded system where you're prepared to maintain the software end to end it's remarkably flexible and permissibly licensed.
Not wanting to move to a new version of Windows isn't even remotely new. Plenty of people didn't want to move from XP to Vista, and some still complain. Regardless of the shaky start to Vista it did improve security and scalability, and move the Windows UI to a compositor model - good for security, smoothness, simplified drivers, and hi DPI monitors (but not so much graphics cards with limited VRAM..).
There really are good reasons for this, especially when browsers now consume an infeasibly huge amount of memory regardless of your operating system (most of 30GB memory[1] on this FreeBSD box is currently consumed by Firefox running forty odd tabs..).
However, the (relatively slow) J5005 Silver in this Wyse 5070 from 2017 is as fast as a decent desktop processor from 2010-2012, yet it's capable of handling websites in 2025. It would be ridiculous to suggest in 2006 on the launch of Vista that running a 486 from 1991 would be sufficient.
I'm all for increased security, you only have to look at the very recent news to see this is an issue. However I'm not convinced the mandate of TPM 2.0 and later CPUs is necessary for this. The vendors have tried to push new PC sales with the mantra of 'security' - and that failed. Now they're trying with the effort of 'AI' and guess what, that's not working either.
I'm moving my systems to FreeBSD, but psst Microsoft - dirty secret for you! I've other things I want to do and an easy option will make me delay that! Drop the processor and TPM requirements, don't insist on a Microsoft account or a sign up to Windows Store[1], let me disable AI, and don't stick adverts in Windows and I'll *buy* an upgrade to Windows 12 Pro.
[1] I do recommend one - it's fast enough and fanless, but note it will run *incredibly slowly* if you install more than 30GB memory. It's necessary to limit the memory used by the OS to no more than this.
[2] looked in store again recently. Tempted by a couple of inexpensive games, looked around, they were cheaper on competing platforms or consoles.
I was under the impression that MySQL previously wasn't suitable for valuable records, but that had improved, so it's quite the surprise to see the comments above and do a Google search that basically seems to confirm join performance is STILL a problem. A SQL server without decent join performance isn't a SQL server, it's a toy.
Mostly I've used MS SQL which has been solid since SQL server 2000 (with a few exceptions[1]). For open source I always chose PostgreSQL[2], even if in past years getting Perl to talk to a PostgreSQL backend under Windows was troublesome (largely solved by Strawberry Perl). PostgreSQL's backup facilities are to say the least primitive, but they can be made to work, and it *is* free.
[1] Constraints and referential integrity are important, but I have seen corruption in MS SQL databases. It's been a rarity in some quite sizable databases, but it has happened. However given the age of the systems I can't say for certain if constraints were added after the data were imported, or exactly which SQL server version the data originated in, it will have migrated between at least 3-4 major SQL releases. I've also seen some oddities in SQL server 2019 which seems to indicate undefined behaviour changed in that release after years of stability, but it's a bit off to blame Microsoft for that when the offending query looks like the developers were on crack that day, and the development team can't explain the lost in the mists of time reason for the logic either.
[2] or SQLite for embedded. Being able to easily link in an in memory database in either open source or Powershell code is incredibly useful.
I've not said the Labour government are the same. They may not necessarily always be much better, but I've not said they're the same?
If you want me to itemise crimes it'll take a while. Whilst I still believe Labour are a better option than continued Tory rule, their continued shift to the right to appease the Reform vote (which, again, will often be driven based on economic grounds. Fix that and people will stop caring about right wing views) is troubling. Specifically the concentration on stick rather than carrot for those in difficult life situations, immigrants, and the ridiculously victimised trans community.
However, fixing things properly requires money, and more money means more taxes, and that means fewer votes.
I'd rather not get into a prolonged discussion about things I can't change though. My conscience is clear : I voted for AV[1], I voted against Brexit, I voted for Not Tory or not right wing at every general and local election, and occasionally donate to causes that I believe in. I don't have the time to get directly involved in political activism, so this is as much as I can do.
[1] It is debatable if AV winning would have helped immediately, I understand it could have cemented Tory rule in the short term. However it would, at least, indicate that further reform of the voting system was possible instead of taking it off the table for another generation. Now we're stuck with FPTP I have to vote for the least worst choice, instead of the possibility of some proportional representation for better or worse (it'd undoubtedly lead to a greater Reform or similar vote that would have to be accounted for, but also a higher Green vote that might help balance things out)
Apologies, you're quite correct. The problem is :
the subsidy was too small
it didn't go on for long enough
energy bills are *still* notably higher than a number of years ago.
I'm fortunate enough with my salary that the energy bills didn't impact me at all, other than noticing the amount I was saving each month was notably lower. Not so with other friends though, who had to be severely minimise how much they had their heating on in winter, something they'd not had to do before.
I will agree that Labour have not covered themselves in glory here. The articles prior to the election are largely irrelevant because oh so shock mea culpa finances were worse than expected so the automatic WFA had to go. Of course that is a nosense, it was clearly planned by Labour to be implemented during the honeymoon period, and they can also be roundly criticised for making it a pain for eligibe pensioners to claim it.
However there's also a degree of the pubic wanting sunshine and unicorns regardless of reality or changing circumstance. It was obvious to anyone wiith two brain cells taxes would need to rise but Labour had to go through a relentless gauntlet sticking to their line on no tax rises for 'working people', and then somehow there's a shock when employers' tax burden increases slightly?
It's yet another problem with politics - it is no longer possible to have an honest converaation with the populace, they just want their life to be better, and a magical 'someone else' to pay for their improved lifesttyle (even if it disadvantages those who shouldn't be pressed further). Very human, but supremely unhelpful.
Yes, it absolutely is. However they did incredibly well in terms of vote share in 2017 (large due to Corbyn pulling a blinder and bringing in students and younger voters) and still lost. Then when things didn't improve immediately the student vote evaporated. In 2019 whichever metric you apply, the Tories won.
I have to say I still think either UK voters are more right wing than you'd expect, or more probably : money is key. People care about what they think is in their pocket, and they don't care about anything else.
In 2024 Labour didn't make many mistakes, and the cost of living (and specifically energy prices), brought the Tories under. I wouldn't be surprised if the Tories had somehow subsidised energy bills they would still be in power.
Basically what Spartacus said. We can see it writ large in both the UK and the US at the moment, and it was explicitly called out on BBC news today : what is important is that people feel better off.
Second is that they actually *are* better off.
Everything else comes second for most people. Despite all the rubbish the Tories pulled pre, during, and 'post' pandemic the time Labour's vote share really improved is when energy prices skyrocketed and the cost of living increase became incredibly obvious for everyone, rather than a slow increase in pricing of everyday items. Nothing else the Tories did shifted the needle significantly : not the lying, the corruption, the deaths in care homes, the gilded wallpaper, or the criminal and sexual offenses.
This is still the case. Apparently the winter fuel allowance and PIP are key factors in Runcorn. You can say what you want about the validity of means testing the WFA (although this in reality means moving a universal benefit to a difficult to obtain bureaucratic one), and despite the fact that Labour are clearly morally correct that pensioners on high pensions don't need three hundred quid to pay their fuel bill, 'a loss of privilege feels like oppression' applies.
Human nature can't be erased. To gain and remain in power you have to gather the votes of people you disagree with, and make unfair trade offs even if that means disadvantaging one set of people to provide an advantage to people who will vote for you. Unless, of course, the voting system is completely reformed - but the liberal democrats fucked that up in 2011, the UK stayed with first past the post, and we're probably stuck with it for another generation.
Stick perceived money (or visible life improvements) in people's pockets, couple it with some actual money, and people will stop caring about the usual right wing flashpoints.
The biggest fault of Corbyn was not accepting that his face didn't fit, and at the level he was operating that is very unfortunately a large factor.
Many of Corbyn's policies were good, or a basically reasonable idea poorly thought out (the 'free broadband' was a prime example : that should have been a set amount of money to pay towards the connectivity of your choice, whether that's fixed line, cellular, or satellite). Problem is, his face didn't fit. The press treated him unfairly but that's still not the point.
If Corbyn had passed control to Kier prior to 2019, but stayed on in a ministerial role there is the possibility that we would have had a Labour government, not had to endure more years of the Tories, and possibly had slightly better policies too. Corbyn attracted a decent vote share in 2017 but this didn't lead to power, and Labour did not learn from that until they lost disastrously in 2019.
People shouldn't judge parties based on their leader, but they do, and you have to deal with reality in politics.
I absolutely agree on the points of spending being more popular than the very convenient 'other' than magically pays for it though.
That's barely a 1/10 troll. Try harder.
It's not pointlessly difficult to cater for. In many cases plant based food is better for the environment (it does depend : almond milk is possibly worse than cow's milk, some plants largely come from areas where people are exploited).
However as to 'pointless'. Whilst there are moral reasons to be vegan, sometimes either a plant based or a meat diet are forced upon you. It can be much easier to go for a plant based diet instead of 'non plant based but without this long list of ingredients I can't tolerate'. Likewise, when some of the more preachy vegan activists claim that 'everyone can eat vegan' this is simply untrue; it's not especially common but some people's gut only works with a meat based diet.
I've noticed the quality of M&S sandwiches - which until recently used to be excellent - has recently dived (specifically for vegan options). Reduced selection, fewer of them. I've given up and moved to Sainsburys.
They do do some rather nice animal monogrammed socks though, worth seeking out.
I'm still on FTTC 80/20, frankly it's good enough for my needs, and even the previous ASDL2+ (20/10 or similar?) was adequate. However it depends how impatient you are.
Played Indiana Jones and the Great Circle recently - a brilliant game, very impressed they've not sold out and have created a genuinely decent experience. It's around 130GB in size.
At 80/20 ~ 3.5 hours (reality was a bit slower)
At 20/10 ~ 14.5 hours
At 115/20 ~ 2.5 hours
160/30 ~ 1:50 hours
330/50 ~ 50 minutes
550/75 ~ 30 minutes
1000/115 ~ 17 minutes
Those are very large differences!
(I am tempted to upgrade to FTTP 550/75. It's a huge improvement and the minimum speed is exactly the same as 1000/115)
because they can, it's just business.
Most people don't need symmetric broadband, it's download the vast majority of consumers and businesses care about. If you're needing a huge amount of upstream bandwidth it's not unlikely a hosted solution is more suitable.
Tiktok may have had an all singing and dancing privacy implementation since 2023, but that's not really useful when GDPR has been in effect since 2018!
Who could have thought that a data slurping app might transmit data to China, blow me down with a feather.
Now all that's next is turning the spotlight on the US properly, I see Meta has been reprimanded for their 'free with tracking or charge' policy which is against GDPR. How about actually enforcing it, and their other blatant violations they only get away with because they're large and can pay lawyers.
I don't want to go for 11 with the requirements on TPMs when I have a very good for 2013 system (dual CPU, etc) that has plenty of power, and 11 drops support for Windows Mixed Reality.
So, sign up for three years of ESU, and continue my migration to FreeBSD.
The parallels between VR and AI are there - both are useful technologies in their own right, both were relentlessly grifted in the early days, and both need a fair bit of investment to achieve their potential.
The problem, as ever, is that eventually a technology finds its niche, and that niche is a niche, it's not a majority mass market product. Worse, almost all VR products (in difference to AI) are relentlessly proprietary. Yes, there are open source alternatives but they're rarely equivalent.
It takes a lot of money to develop a decent VR product. It takes more money to develop a decent VR product than the equivalent flat screen experience, and the cost/hours of entertainment ratio is usually significantly lower (other than outliers, such as Skyrim VR).
I've a Rift CV1, an Oculus Go, a Lenovo WMR, and a Playstation VR2 (plus PC adapter). All of them are decent products and have generated decent experiences (Lone Echo is the closest I want to get to a real space walk..). I've never used them for social VR experiences and have no intention of doing so. The headsets aren't actually used that often simply because it always requires strapping a device to your face, and often you don't want to do that, or to have it take over your entire view. However when I do use them I enjoy the experience (Rez Infinite is stunningly trippy in VR, SuperHOT is excellent, Google Earth remains the hands down killer VR app, and it's fun to do virtual sculpting or render a mathematical formulae in 3D and rotate it in stereoscopy using your hands) and wouldn't want to be without them.
Meta, *please* release the source code if you stop supporting your VR headsets. I don't want to go down the route of WMR where it's now unsupported in the latest Windows 11 build, and you need to stay on Windows 10 to continue using it.
With respect, just how much more of a guarantee do you want than a product that has been maintained for at least six years? Exchange is a commercial product, pay money for third party products to support it. Also it's under a tenner per year, about the price of two (good) pints of beer, it is not a disaster if it fails.
I understand where you're coming from, but you can't have your cake and eat it. I unfortunately view this as excuses for a 'I want this for free' attitude from many people.
If you're relying on a legacy technology that will only decline in popularity it's a good idea to fund and look for open source alternatives because the commercial market will either not be able to make a sufficient return on investment to support it in the long term or will charge wallet wincingly high prices. SCA SCSI to SATA appears to currently be in this position - it jumped the shark by ACARD being taken over, ramping up prices to over a grand, and now it appears difficult to buy their products at all, no open source alternative exists (parallel SCSI to SD card products are readily available, not so LVD SCSI).
This is not even remotely similar to the position of Exchange. Regardless of Microsoft's push to move Exchange to be an Azure hosted solution only, it remains Microsoft's flagship and strategic e-mail product. The OWL plugin for Thunderbird has been in existence since at least 2019. The OWL plugin costs 9 quid a year for single users, on quantity it reduces (30 licences appear to be 7 quid each/year).
Do you seriously want to find developers to develop a competing product for free via funding or somehow convincing people to do it gratis (good lock with that), in the process fucking over a company that's been contributing to Thunderbird for years and charging an insultingly small license cost? The time to do that is when Exchange is no longer a maintained product, this is not that time.
I'm moving my e-mail from a completely free Gmail business product to a paid hosted e-mail solution because I'm fed up with Gmail's features, attitude, and Google's privacy viewpoint. I would also pay for a commercial FreeBSD compatible mail client. I do love open source, and an operating system not driven by commercial interests (which is why I try to use FreeBSD), but dear goodness would I prefer to just pay someone a moderate amount of money and not have to fanny around with Unix nerdery, bugs, lack of features, and workarounds much of the time, unless I'm specifically setting out to learn new skills.
It already exists. It's called the paid for OWL plugin.
A free client? You're having a laugh. If a commercial product can't make it, why do you think a free one will? Who will fund or code it?
I do wonder just how good OWL is - Exchange is more than just 'e-mail' - it does workflow and both Exchange and Outlook integrate to other applications when set up properly. Not to mention that in the past when I dealt with Exchange (this was admittedly no later than 2008) what was in the specification, and what Exchange actually did were two different things. As I found out when my application crashed upon a 'mandatory' field not existing. Error trapping added to check and work around even 'mandatory' fields not being present. Not to mention the joys of dealing with rich text and foreign mail systems.
Outlook is generally fine. As I mentioned below I've recently returned to Thunderbird after a long absence, and it really hasn't improved that much in the interim. On the other hand Outlook at work is largely trouble free, although I find its search facilities incredibly annoying[1]
[1] Outlook 365. Trying to get it to *only* search for full words is a huge pain, should be easy. I'd love to say Thunderbird is far better, but it clearly isn't - either its search is broken or the index is, because it won't find e-mails I know are there, whichever root cause it is isn't encouraging.
After over a decade of abandoning Thunderbird I've finally returned, as I'm moving off Gmail business[1] and migrating my e-mail elsewhere.
It's not going without incident. I've already got corruption in the database - it won't compact my e-mail. It often (under Wayland, labwc compositor) grabs focus when an e-mail arrives. Search, much though I hate to admit it, is much better under Gmail. It's difficult to know when IMAP folder rules are still firing - which is quite useful if you've imported 80,000 e-mails and are trying to rationalise them.
Any recommendation for an utterly solid and featureful e-mail client that runs under FreeBSD would be welcome. Doesn't have to be graphical, but does need to have a way of at least shelling out to display images, or HTML at times.
I know it's free, and I know I'm throwing a fair number of messages at it, and it's nice that it exists at all. However I'd be happy to pay for something really solid and functional.
[1] I have the legacy free offering, which is still valid as I'm not (currently) making money off my hosted domains. I wouldn't pay for it, though, with the annoying continually changing features and authentication foibles. When I set up a new account in *MY* domain, I do not want you to ask for a mobile number to 'verify' the account I have just set up, thank you..
Although the Southport attack was abhorrent, the other news that springs immediately to mind is the 'assault' on Matt Hancock's advisor back in 2019.
It was clearly rubbish, but in the new world of up to the minute 'news' and everyone desperate for engagement, reporters who should know better submitted breaking news without verifying the source. I'd like to say things have improved since, but I've seen little sign of it.
Seems to me MPs think this legislation is a big stick to hit people with when the consequences are something they dislike, even when the root cause (social cohesion, funding, facilities) are very definitely political ones. The rules apply to 'online' but not so much other information sources.
Another possibility is tumbling many of the influencers and algorithmic boosts of posts in social media - but that would break their business model, so don't hold your breath.
Not to mention the orange faced 'leader of the free world' frequently is Economical With The Actualité. Remind me just how long it took Twitter to ban him last time?
The online safety act applies regardless of location and jurisdiction. Based on the above Twitter, owned by er, the right hand of Orange Face, should ban Orange Face for misinformation based on the OSA. Alternatively, they need to ban everyone in the UK from accessing it.
Bets on this happening, ever?
As I understand it the issue with only encrypting one partition is it provides a greater attack surface to be able to decrypt your given example of /home. Also, there's the possibility of unwanted data leaking into swap or possibly other files in non /home partitions.
Otherwise though, I tend to agree with your xkcd view. I tried using full disc encryption on OpenBSD and it works brilliantly, and is very straightforward to set up. Problem is it does come with a noticeable performance penalty, and makes sharing the disk with other operating systems impossible. Also, whilst work has statutory and contractual requirements to ensure data is kept secure and encrypted, I'm not kidding myself that anyone really wants to see a lot of technical stuff and many cat pictures on my personal laptop. I backed up my data to a non encrypted USB stick, re-installed without, and have never needed to revisit it again.
Pretty much. I love OpenBSD but it's not a great desktop, and the OpenBSD team have, and will continue to, put security before everything else. That's moderately fine in an appliance, less so for a desktop.
If you stick to the functionality purely in base and don't use anything really obscure you're unlikely to run into many issues.
OpenBSD is a lot better as a desktop than it used to be - you've got the usual browser, Libreoffice, and moderately decent graphics chipset support. vmm allows for other OS to be virtualised - but with no graphics, so that's a tad limiting. WINE is a complete non starter (it's also not great under FreeBSD - Linux's API coverage is an order of magnitude better).
There's been a lot of ongoing grumbling about the file system, but OpenBSD are very strict about licensing (which is why ZFS isn't on there), and are also generally pretty conservative. It's the only BSD where I would be happy to run -current.
So easy to apply with sysupgrade too - type command, make cup of tea, done!
I might have to revisit the wireless capability, as last time I checked (a few years now) it was rather spotty. I had issues running OpenBSD as an access point, and eventually gave up and bought a dedicated AP (which mostly worked much better, but not entirely, because one particular mobile has abysmal wireless capability and was actually more stable under the older OpenBSD chipset I was using. Every thing else was far faster on the new AP.)
It'd be nice to have a more modern file system in OpenBSD, but as I generally use it on firewalls it hasn't been much of an issue. One grubby little secret of FreeBSD is that ZFS isn't actually completely resilient - mirrored swap in particular can fail under low memory conditions. The workarounds are either don't mirror your swap (stupid), or use gmirror to mirror it. However gmirror needs to be set up from the command line - particularly on a modern UEFI system. You should also allocate an EFI partition considerably in excess of 1M (suggested by one guide online), I just selected 1G to be sure. Mirror the EFI partition or don't stick it in fstab, otherwise your install won't actually be resilient on reboot!
I've also had a crash in FreeBSD's disk driver take out my ZFS on root mirror, requiring recovery from install media. Not difficult to do, and it only happened once, but it's still a little concerning.
Almost certainly. The question is what flavour or strength of poison you wish to take and the associated technical debt. Unless you're lucky it's a lot of effort to bring up a product from scratch with no external dependencies in a timely manner.
The worst dependencies I've seen in the product I've dealt with heavily for years have mostly been third party programming components or in one case supplied Microsoft components (SQL Reporting Services had some notable capacity limitations in earlier versions, now fixed). The time to market and cost for an in house developed alternative to the third party components simply weren't acceptable - the later pain and technical debt that needed to be dealt with were ultimately worth it although I didn't enjoy the workarounds at the time!
For non programming components or the languages/runtimes themselves the lock in is acceptable, particularly when most other customers are using the same platform and languages. Microsoft are in general fantastic at backwards compatibility unless you're daft enough to pursue some of their new tech immediately and get burned by some of their desktop forms, web, or mobile ventures that they dropped in a relatively short time frame. Thank goodness we never bothered with technology such as Silverlight; others did and the rewrite was expensive.
I think perverse is stretching things. There are times when an irritating number of APIs have to be called in Just The Right Way (I seem to remember fiddling with ACLs a long time ago fell into this category), whereas some other operating systems just used 'bung some values into this struct and pass it to a function, job done' but on the whole Windows' documentation is good, and the API coverage extensive.
It works both ways though, there are so many areas where Linux historically and BSD (still, right now) are lacking in documentation or the solution is 'run this sysctl, parse the text output' or 'this isn't a user mode API, even though there's a good reason to use it in user mode'. Whereas for Windows the API has existed for years, has better documentation, doesn't use fragile text parsing, and covers more use cases.
I've also watched more than one presentation where Linux and BSD enthusiasts compare the Windows way of doing things with the Unix way, (for more modern technology such as USB IIRC), and the Unix way is incredibly painful.
Windows dev tools are, in general, much better too. I tried CLion under Unix and its obsession with CMake made it unusable for my needs. I had to resort to Qtcreator, which involved faffing around with config files. It's not bad for free, but Visual Studio has handled all the scenarios I wanted and only vanishingly rarely needing to drop into an editor to tweak things.
The whole *point* of many commercial products is to tie you into their products and provide a steady revenue scheme, it is not in their interest to make it easy to migrate away.
'Linux' is no different, unless they actually mean 'open source that works, with decent documentation'. A not inconsiderable amount of 'Linux' software doesn't work particularly well, the documentation is appalling, and to get it to work properly or easily needs proprietary components or paid consultancy which the software provider *oh so surprisingly* also sells. Funny that the documentation never becomes amazing whilst consultancy is on offer, isn't it?
Take Kea. It's actually pretty decent. It's (mostly) open source. The documentation is good. It's pretty easy to get running. There aren't too many unexpected gotchas (which is more than you can say for BIND). Yet the real enterprisey auditing hooks are paid for (to be fair it's a fairly specific set of hooks, most of the functionality you'd want is gratis). This is probably as good as you're going to get, and the (paid) support is entirely optional.
Pot, kettle for AWS. In theory I understand you can run AWS apps locally, I vaguely checked it out after looking at the requirements for the supposed situation when Elite Dangerous stops being sold and the AWS based server software is released 'for free'. In practice the list of dependencies and the effort to get it running locally appears far beyond the informed enthusiast level, and into the realm of paid professional.
By definition software or services that sell for money will generally work (to some extent), and have advantages over free options (usually), otherwise no-one buys it and the product dies. Companies get a leg up over designing a product from scratch using generic completely open source components with no appreciate commercial influence.
It's not surprising Microsoft did this, either. Back before the turn of the century SQL Server licensing (7, I think) did not prohibit a one user model for SQL clients on servers, which could be used to multiplex websites and save large amounts of money on licensing. Microsoft changed the online licensing whilst the product was still on sale and as the Internet grew in popularity, despite the earlier (printed) licensing contradicting this. SQL Server 2000 had specific licensing designed around webservers right from the start. Mind you, 7 wasn't one of the better products, and the management interface was slow and limited.
If you're running either AD based DNS or a mixed BIND/KEA infrastructure there is *already* something automated messing with DNS zones through the use of either DDNS or other updates. Not sure that's a problem - it's reasonably locked down, there's a fair bit of logging, and the security control is quite granular.
Not particularly worried about SMTP/IMAP etc either, by the time 2029 rolls round the products can be updated or upgraded to support certificate renewal.
Embedded systems, older systems, non mostly directly Internet connected systems fair point!
BMS was a new acronym for me, I can imagine on a vaguely related note all sorts of IoT definitely not supporting the infrastructure. So many more devices to be ewasted, or to more probably have internal CAs set up.
It's going to be a whole set of manual hassle, or buying new systems to handle it. Out of interest I went looking at the state of motherboard BMC which I haven't had to touch professionally for some time, and personally for cost related reasons is limited to second hand ex corporate ebay hardware. The hardware I have here supports manual certificate updates, but modern server motherboards do now appear to support centralised management which could resolve this, and I really do mean modern. Looking at recent Supermicro BMC manuals it appears at first glance that products from late 2024 include the necessary management, but it's not apparently obvious that anything older does.
Start planning for substantial hardware refreshes in the next few years!
Web servers - not so much. I imagine the big commercial boys will have sorted this properly by 2029 even for those with little experience, and open source won't be too painful either. Personally the last time I used certificates for public facing servers was the mid to late 00s and it was less painful each subsequent renewal as processes improved.
I have to say that whilst work are (generally) OK with certificates and administration in general we have had production systems go down due to failed monitoring and renewal processes. There's really no excuse for this, but with changes of this magnitude the onus is really on the operating system vendors to make this bullet proof in most conceivable situations, and it clearly isn't.
I foresee problems with SSO, which from the looks of things is affected in the same way. It's already enough of an issue integrating with third party companies with various degrees of technical competence.
To give you an idea of how horrific some companies are : one company had secure socket authentication issues because the time on many of their systems was out by at least an hour. This was not a small company, and they absolutely refused to consider mid 90s technology (well into the 10s) to fix their estate. Whilst my personal response would be 'fix your systems, you idiots' the business generated necessitated some unwelcome workarounds instead.
Hopefully with notice this move will be OK - the relatively swift move to TLS 1.1, then 1.2 or better was actually quite well received by customers. I was glad to be able to get rid of some horrific legacy devices that didn't actually even support TLS 1.0 correctly.
Automated certificate maintenance on embedded devices is a bigger deal, and I've already seen a recent example where a manufacturer is refusing to support devices because (cynical assumption) 'we want to make more money, that's why, buy our new kit'. I will put money on certain customers having to upgrade in a couple of years despite the device being perfectly capable to run current standards, and then a year later being told 'the device you upgraded to doesn't support automated certificate update, our management software can't handle it (because we choose not to), buy another device'.
Oh, and the management software, which used to be free, is now subscription based and vastly more expensive because Numbers Must Go Up and damn everyone else.
So, whilst the certificate cost may be minimal, the software and device upgrades certainly aren't.
I'm with you in that hosts files are usually a bad idea. Resolv.conf though, I'd say is equally annoying.
On Windows - just use Powershell to set DNS parameters if you really must set them manually.
On a fair bit of modern Unix editing resolv.conf is a huge pain to be avoided as it can easily get overwritten by a local resolver.
I would far prefer to use the DNS server to set it. If you can't do it via an AD based DNS server because of a VPN, do it on a downstream DNS server.
I realise there will be some VPN and networking combinations that make this difficult; VPNs are much better than they used to be but still not exactly perfect.
I'd also note that when I spent the effort to do DNS properly on my home network rather than using public DNS, and assigned my work laptop the work domain for resolution by default (everything else on my personal domain) the VPN client on restore from hibernation went from spending 5-10 seconds thinking about if it could see the remote endpoint to being available instantly.
Frankly, this is the best time. I'm more of a BSD person but Linux is highly polished and you have the advantage of being able to learn at your own pace and just revert to using Windows when necessary.
Personally I find Linux rather too like Windows in some ways, but that will in some ways be due to both the commercial pressures and the userbase.
That'll be because Quakers are in general nice people and let other groups use their meeting places.
Looking at your own link the threat to 'shut down London' is through non violent protest blocking roads, so whilst there will be different opinions on this, it seems rather over the top for the police to kick the door in.
And for the second link 'Its demands of the government include stopping all trade with Israel and raising money from "the super rich and fossil fuel elite" to pay damages for the effects of fossil fuel burning.'
I mean, that's obviously a really out there extreme opinion when there is an overwhelming amount of evidence of the currently one sided nature of the Israel/Gaza conflict[1], and that the super rich contribute vastly more to emissions than anyone else
[1] If you want balance here, the 9/11 response was also incredibly one sided and disproportionate. Hamas were stupid for not considering the response was predictable. However, that doesn't make it right either now, or then.
It ran CP/M - badly. If you're going to compare it to the PCW the 128 by itself initially looks OK, however :
It's slow, due to the 128's flawed architecture the Z80 is running at an effective 2MHz
By the time a full package of a 128 is added up, including monitor, disk drive, and printer you'll be paying as much or more than a PCW, and it still won't come with Locoscript
Most CP/M software doesn't support colour by default, so the 128's more flexible graphics aren't as much as advantage as you'd think
The base model PCW8256 had twice the memory
If you're looking primarily for a CP/M machine, you'd choose a PCW. If you want something that could also run games and do colour, you'd probably go for a CPC6128.
Although CP/M was a huge advantage for the PCW its main advantage was that out of the box it could do affordable word processing.
Remember from Buncefield and other disasters that the off site backup or the hot/cold standby systems should be an appreciable distance from your main business (which of course adds a large amount of suspense).
Too many disasters have been affected by large power outages, dependencies which turned out later on to have a single point of failure, or appreciate natural disasters.
I think some of work's data centres are around thirty miles from one another as the crow flies, which isn't perfect, but it's likely to need such a large disaster that the only thing most of us would care about would be staying alive to worry about greater resilience.
There's probably not a lot VMWare offers that you can't get elsewhere with appropriate effort, but I have to give it to them that provided you use hardware off the HCL and use their products in an approved manner it's pretty pain free - although my exploration of VMWare has been at a fairly low end. The issues I had with VMWare boiled down to trying to use hardware not on the HCL, and moving VMs between different free VMWare products - unsurprisingly they started making that more difficult as the years went on.
I've used other products too, right from bringing up Xen from bare metal, and KVM before it was nicely bundled, to some of the more turn key offerings, and whilst they've been good, I have to admit VMWare has overall been less hassle.
Personally I don't need quite as much an easy life to risk rapacious Broadcom licensing, but others may think differently. Staff time is not free, and if you're paying a company to migrate you, you're going to need to do due diligence to ensure they won't do a Broadcom themselves in a few years. Even if it's 'open source' that's hardly a get out of jail free card, with all the proprietary components companies sell on top, not to mention the usually lacklustre documentation.
Fortunately the work VMWare stuff I kept going on a shoestring finally got properly funded and moved to a resilient Cisco infrastructure, and then the whole business moved to Hyper-V. Apart from a few CPU resource issues in the early days, now it's pretty much pain free.
For all the complaints I have about work, they were smart enough to move away from VMWare, and unsurprisingly smart enough to be very diligent in removing all Java from the organisation lest Oracle's outrageous licensing apply.
It does depend on the cat, but in general cats don't actually need attention all the time. If you stay in one place to work the key is to provide them a place nearby to sleep, or a 'fake laptop' if they like mirroring you by trying to sit on the laptop. After a little while they tend to settle down and enjoy being close.
I found putting a cat tree directly next to my desk where my most needy cat could see what I was doing but not disturb me was most effective.
I see your point Liam, but that attitude also perpetuates another continuing problem : maintainance is not respected.
Frankly, the initial development is often the *easy* part. It's visible, it's new, everyone likes it, it's used in fairly straightforward ways.
A few years in there's more edge cases, dealing with scenarios that only arise after extended usage, and finding out if the original design actually was solid, but hey, it's just 'continuing to work' isn't it, so no value is seen.
One of the most egregious examples are display drivers in Xorg - the average user may see their system works as normal, whilst in fact the display driver has been rewritten no less than three times to accommodate new driver models.
You don't like it? Oh dear *what a shame*, I don't care, what's for tea?
They should do a nine o'clock news and run over a few more pretend hedgehogs (search for 'I like trucking' for the reference on this).
Yet another example that no-one takes you seriously or respects you, unless you charge enough. The more you charge, the more they take you seriously (in general).
Open source may be freely available, but if you're using it regularly or deriving value from it you should be contributing to the project or paying money.
I'm also laughing at the idea that people will not pay for software similar to this. Of course they will. The development of Object Desktop for Windows kept Stardock alive in their transition from OS/2 to Windows in the 90s, and UI improvements that make using computers more pleasant or increases productivity still have value now.
I'd be interested too, last time I looked Odin hadn't moved on noticeably from the 90s, and it was hardly great then. There is a changelog, which seems to indicate a flurry of activity around 2004, a bit more in 2011, and then bits until 2017 where it's remained since.
I can't believe it's in any way competitive to WINE. I've run WINE under both FreeBSD and Linux and there is an order of magnitude improvement running WINE under Linux over FreeBSD, let alone comparing to Odin.
Arca Noae do good work with ArcaOS, but it still feels like what it is : a 90s operating system that can run on modern systems, with a number of modern conveniences. Still, it looks like the Dooble web browser is staying very up to date, if still in beta, and OpenOffice (2018 release) is available, could be worse.
Weeeelll.. I think it's a stretch to call COBOL beautiful - very useful and proficient at specific tasks yes. Annoyingly verbose, although to be fair I never covered it deeply and it's been a long time.
You can very definitely do a lot of fun stuff with it, especially if you use COBOL.NET, and even before then too - it just took more work than using C.
It can always go wrong. This is some time ago (it was an OS/2 product for a start..) but it stuck in my mind.
Went to do a 'trivial' upgrade. This was planned properly, before the upgrade everything was backed up to a Netware server. This took two hours.
Ran the upgrade that had been run on other systems many times before. It failed. Retries did not help. Rang the manufacturer support line, they did not have an immediate answer.
OK. Fine. The system needed to be operational by that evening. It took two hours to copy up, we have time in the schedule, copy back down - it'll be ready in two hours.
No. Try *four* hours. Finally got out of there at 9pm that night, everything restored to normal.
Following day the manufacturer had found the issue (weird licensing issue I think, but it was a long time ago). Two hours backup again. Upgraded in less than an hour. Job done.
The very obvious one is a delayed dead man's switch. Set up a process that achieves the desired action if something innocuous doesn't happen on a regular basis. Do not forget to do that thing on a regular basis whilst you're still employed.
It doesn't take a genius to work out who the culprit is if someone is sacked and suddenly everyone else is locked out of the system. On the other hand, if things started going wrong three weeks later, and then became worse the finger of blame might not point in the ex employee's direction. Particularly if this was disguised as malware from the 'Wr3c4r Kr00' rather than IsJoeEmployeeStillEmployed.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
