Posts by JLV

FreeDOS 1.4: Still DOS, still FOSS, more modern than ever

Re: When did you start "...sucking hind tit..."; start using copiers rather than writers, El Reg?

If I wanted to read my IT tech news on Ars, I'd be doing so on Ars. With something like DOS coverage, I am sure the news can keep a few days, it's not like El Reg is covering Heartbleed here.

FWIW too, the Ars commentariat is fairly one-minded and not particularly enlightening to follow.

No need to be so dissy. Trump got your day?

Speaking of which, on something where timing *does* matter, El Reg has already announced Trump's temporary tariff pause (where have we heard that one before?). Ars is still crickets on it. Yeah, the news just came out, true, so no hate on Ars. But does it speak to your post being wrong. And just plain rude.

Tech suppliers await final grade as Trump prepares to flunk Department of Education

but they are getting thought control.

Re: Trump Retirement Condominiums

Even more to the point in this context, Trump University can save the day.

Oh, wait.

Wait, wait, aren't the Republicans the ones who are always bigging up the Constitution wrt everything? "If the Holy Founders had meant to regulate ghost gun printing they'd have put that in the Constitution!"

Separation of powers? Checks and balances? No powergrab by the King, sorry, President?

And, yes, now you have them peddling unmitigated unitary executive theory.

Well, mind you, at some point you had them also being the hard cases on Russia. And, on balancing budgets.

I fear that the main beneficiary of the coming next 4 years is going to be China, as the rest of Western countries uncouple from the US. The only positive spin on that is that China has its own economic problems, starting with unsold housing developments.

US Army’s laser obsession continues with yet another drone-zapper deal

This claim is highly contradicted by the prevalence of snipers on the Ukrainian side at least. And, since you date this all the way back to the early 90s, the travails of the NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also, it is one thing to be able to kinda localize a sniper quickly, in angular terms. But at very long ranges that leaves plenty of uncertainty where the sniper is located and plenty of time for them to get off a few more shots before breaking off.

Also, on a related field, as far as the technology that was sold to US police forces to detect firearm shots in urban areas, it seems a number of police forces have given up on them.

To be clearer: I was talking about the Barretts taking out nice juicy unarmored anti-drone lasers.

- send in snipers covertly

- take out the defensive lasers at a pre-arranged time.

- immediately swarm the place with drones.

Ditto with the artillery: Lasers vs drones, OK. But what about artillery vs lasers? The existing, first, model this article refers to is, I believe, not armored. Now, I know that unarmored, quick, mobile artillery and rockets (Caesar, Himars truck) are doing fine in Ukraine. But they shoot and scoot. These lasers are a point defense, so they need to remain somewhat static.

Also, armored or soft-skinned? Obviously, the second is much cheaper. However, near the frontline remember what those 2.5km range .50 Barrett-style anti-materiel sniper rifles are made for. Not to mention artillery, which NATO armies had largely forgotten about until Ukraine.

Then drone themselves are evolving: standard RC ones crowd themselves out of the radio spectrum, so you can't fire too many at the same spot. But now they're deploying ones guided w fiber-optic cables at scale. As well as terminal range (about 2km so far) AI lock-and-forget guidance.

An appropriate doctrine will take a while to take shape and field-level experimentation seems the order of the day.

I dunno, but it would seem to me this might a bit like the tank situation in the 1930s. The capabilities needed, and the type of systems to procure, may need to gel for a while, depending on what the situation ends up looking like.

With the ranges cited, this looks more for nuking the Predator/Reaper/Bayraktar type drones than Ukraine-area's fast 1st person consumer kit and there probably is a case for several types of drone killers:

- how portable? how expensive? : things that are so big and few that they only protect rear areas don't help the frontline grunts.

- what's the cycle time between shots? A 500% sure killing system with 60 sec to recharge is open to swarming.

- what's the power source and how many shots do you get in total before you need to expend serious time reloading?

- still very experimental tech: best maybe to have 2 systems going and diligently pull the plug on whichever one is failing overmuch.

Pentagon kills off HR IT project after 780% budget overrun, years of delays

Oh, I understand that alright. The F35 famously has contractors in every single state. I suspect that if you were to dig into the SLS, similar things would show.

You are also quite correct on your last paragraph. From a purely capitalist optimization PoV countries should not try to run an industrial policy to coddle local companies in making stuff that could be purchased more cheaply elsewhere.

But... to take advanced chips as an example, yes, the correct financial approach is to just buy TSMC from Taiwanese plants. But now what happens if Taiwan gets invaded (or, hypothetically decides to join China cuz Trump ain't gonna help/is even worse)? Now you don't have any friendly advanced chip manufacturing capacity. And we all saw how well not being able to make some basic enabling tech or components has worked out for Russia.

Or Europe/Canada waking up to the notion that exclusive reliance on US cloud companies can become problematic when morons get elected there. The devil is in the details: how do you run national-security critical companies on some less than fully competitive basis, without them just becoming a herd of pigs at the trough? Keeping staff on empty production lines may not be optimal: a lot of efficiency is derived from, well, actually making things. Esp. in the semiconductor space.

(OK, Trump's USA is unlikely to be as toxic to Taiwan as the CCP has been in Hong Kong. But let's assume that for whatever reason the Taiwanese re-unification camp gets the upper hand.)

> Going about making improvements by shutting down entire agencies with no thought for how to preserve the important things the agency does is reckless

Oh, I entirely agree the whole exercise as it stands is reckless. They're gutting the IRS, FFS. I am just saying it didn't need to be - there's plenty of actual pork to trim out, although nowhere as much as Musk and Trump like to claim as they justify cutting taxes.

And it's certainly not all Dem side wasting taxpayers' money. Y'all remember the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska?

BTW, when writing one of these excellent ERP articles, please, please, mention the vendor (and if applicable name the prime integrators, like IBM, Accenture and Capita).

https://www.dcpas.osd.mil/sites/default/files/2021-06/March_2020_DCHRMS_Newsletter.pdf

"For those of you who are unaware of what DCHRMS is, it is an Oracle Software as a Service (SaaS) Human Capital Management solution that allows us to centralize personnel data across the Department of Defense (DoD) enterprise. "

The sad thing is that, if Musk and Trump had been less Musk and Trump and DOGE was being slower, less biased and more deliberate in its target, how much better would this be received:

- axe the SLS at NASA. either redistribute the $ to better NASA programs, yes, even to SpaceX purchases if really,really,really warranted. Or, saving$$$!

- ditch DCHRMS and its ilk. and much of the Accentures and McKinsey hanger ons.

- nuke any of the $500 kinetic impact injectors (a famous 1980s hammer procurement scandal) and over priced toilets

- close the military bases the DoD does not need or want, but are porking things up

- zap more weapons programs (esp. the ones looking questionable given the new reality of high intensity peer warfare we see) when they balloon in prices. streamline the procurement department, giving more freedom to the arms manufacturers. perma-ban those manufacturers who abuse the system.

- be aggressive in vendor overcharging for special-for-Feds gear and instead leverage size to drive down prices. &terminate any gougers

- while you are at it: drug prices, drug prices, drug prices

....

It ought not to be rocket science, if you have the mandate and are a stable genius. Which neither of the 2 are.

Samsung co-CEO Han Jong-hee dies of heart attack at 63

Re: co-CEO

That's really quite interesting. But keep in mind another motivation may also be that S Korea has a some problems with the chaebol being too overbearing. Maybe this was also a way to keep that in check.

RIP in any case, 63 is uncomfortably close for me too.

Trump orders all government IT contracts consolidated under GSA

GSA Catalog - Category #ZQ77-443-22 - Light trucks

- option a. Cybertruck - Silver

- option b. Cybertruck - Silver

- option c. Cybertruck - Silver

Vivaldi 7.2 browser wants to topple tech's feudal lords

Re: So....

Reminds of the me barrista here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNxDd3l0lEU

(God, that is one slooow loading YouTube vid. 13 yrs ago. Must be on tape archive by now). And I think it's Bighead from Silicon Valley that does the barrista quip.

Firefox for anything sensitive (NoScript). Vivaldi for the rest. It really is pretty nice, though I never put much effort into customizing it. On 7.1, looking forward to 7.2 then.

Like Firefox, this is the kind of program where a simple, one-time, payment is something I would do to support them (say $50-80ish). No, not a Patreon. And most certainly not a subscription!

SAP legacy ERP customers still in no rush to adopt latest platform

The interesting thing to have in mind is where the revenue streams lie in ERP.

At 20%-ish maintenance fees, a site pays back its initial license fees within 5 years (a subtlety not missed on Oracle salespeople adding "freebie" modules as incentives during sales - freebie for licenses, not for maintenance).

So, if the customer base was to say, too bad, we're just going to stick to it unsupported, poor SAP would be as happy as a demasted sailboat in the Drake Passage during a winter storm.

Mind you, that is probably not realistic without 3rd party offerings as an ERP system needs to track ongoing regulatory and taxation changes. Domestically, and for the multinationals using the big ERPs, worldwide.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

This reminds me of a certain unnamed vendor where I had a massive bughunt going.

SUP DUDE #1 - Please submit the details of your environment.

Me: Done.

... long back and forth ...

SUP DUDE #1 - gonna need to escalate.

SUP DUDE #2 - Please submit the details of your environment.

Me: but it's already there

SUP DUDE #2 - Please submit the details of your environment.

Me: Done.

... long back and forth ...

SUP DUDE #2 - gonna need to escalate.

SUP DUDE #3 - ... I'll let you all guess...

I get the idea. As tech support, one metric you get rated on your turnaround time. 5 min to send a request for unnecessary info to a customer does wonders for turnaround time. Especially if they get fed up, don't follow up and you close it for inactivity :-) Win win!

Google says it's rolling out fix for stricken Chromecasts

Mine on the fritz right now, but luckily I was too slow to figure out reset procedures, iOS was exceptionally slow to download Google Home and meanwhile I googled the error message and found out it was a known bug for everyone.

I know it is very much passé and gauche to say anything good about anything Google, but this has been a good little device. Running 5-6 years now, bought it for $50CAD, much less flakey than my TVs hub or whatever it's called. You would hardly think it was from Google, from its unobtrusiveness.

On the other hand, whenever I have to deal with it, it always it seems I need to download all 500Mb of Google Home and that is one heck of piece of bloatware to set a wifi password with. Then of, course, I delete that PoS ASAP.

Hoping it comes back to life.

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Well, to paraphrase a certain, very clever, user hereabouts:

"Mr. President, so much winning against Chinese espionage! Now they can't possibly repeat the 2015 OPM hack!"

Ooops, I let myself get carried away and actually wrote too much info. I'll keep it to "winning!" next time. Sorry, wuz dehydrated cuz forgot my thirst mutilator so off my game.

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

Re: But why tho?

I could be wrong, but don't a lot of the branded laptops do exactly that nowadays? Following Apple's lead, after they figured out how it would help them stiff the customers some more?

Alacritty - "we don't do tabs"

Warp - dishonorable mention: "we hijack shell completion and substitute our best guesses as to it should be like". "From our cloud AI" or somesuch. Guesses which is, at least my case, were off the mark more often than not. No, no opt out available, been raised as an issue 2 years ago, royally ignored.

Which actually makes me think: how much do influencers, podcasters, reviewers etc that covered Warp with praise actually used it in any advanced fashion? Because any hardened terminal dweller would near instantly hit that as major, major, issue.

If all you do is cat a big text file and see how long that takes, sure, great metric here. Another thing Warp did when I used it is "clump" together output as units. Great in theory, you can copy/paste by just hitting the "clump" somewhere rather than painstakingly dragging the mouse all around. Not so great when you realize that their display is basically a smart head -x | tail -x and you are out of luck if you want to see something in the middle. Might have been fixed since, or possibly I was too clueless and missed something in their UI, but.... grrrrrr.

Horrible forgetfulness...

Kitty was my first GPU terminal from iTerm2. It's quite similar in feature set to Ghostty and Wezterm. Tabbed, GPU, accelerated, etc... The main dev is a tad too opinionated on various things, such as emoji pickers and dislike of tmux. Now, I don't care much for tmux myself, but many people do and not supporting it well is an issue here. Still, a very robust and capable terminal.

FWIW GPU accelerated terminals like Kitty, ghostty and wezterm can also basically "cat" an image to the terminal. Useful if you want to quickly see say an ERD or UML (gasp) diagrams, without leaving the terminal to go to some GUI app.

From my personal experience in the old days of windows 7-ish, printing a lot of output into a terminal significantly slowed running even otherwise IO/CPU-intensive programs (database batches mostly).

Also it's not only about perceived speed. GPUs *generally* use less power to do what what they do, compared to a CPU.

I mean the GPU is there, why not outsource painting on a screen to it?

Re: There's one feature I miss, and it was ruined by Apple

That's odd. I just tried ⏩ (F9) on Music - I usually use the mouse for that - and it worked just fine for me, skipped to the next song. Do you think some previous configuration/app might have messed that up? On Sequoia.

Terminals are one area in which the baked-in Apple is specifically weak.

What I've used.

- iTerm2 - pretty good. GUI-based configuration doesn't sit well with me though, but solid offering with a lots of bells and whistles. macos specific

- Wezterm - quite good. GPU-acceleration, works on Linux. LUA-based configuration files. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but learning curve is steepened by overambitious example repos.

- Ghostty. My daily driver. GPU-acceleration, works on Linux (and Windows in future). Simple key-value config files. Pretty impressive for a V1.1 that only came late last year.

Honorable mention as text editor: Zed, which is still in 0.1x level, but is extremely good at being a very simple robust text editor. VS Code, also used, has all the bells and whistles but can be frustratingly slow on big Python projects.

Macports as my primary package manager. Mostly because I started with it. I also use Homebrew to install whatever packages macports does not have.

Honestly, on the command line, in my experience, given the same toolset, a Mac pretty much behaves like a Linux machine. The same FOSS languages, databases, compilers, etc run on it just fine.

Re: But why tho?

For exactly the reasons they gave in the article. It's a desktop for those of us who are too lazy to spend time configuring desktops.

> We tend to use Macs as if they were Linux machines with a shinier desktop – we don't use most of Apple's apps and services.

I totally get that, for someone of a sysadmin nature, like many people here, they have the chops and interest to configure Linux to their exact preferences. Personally, I find Linux quite pleasant to configure, mostly via Ansible, on VMs. Can't say I really enjoy the experience on a laptop (Ubuntu 2204/2404 on a Framework laptop, certified OS, but not pre-installed for me) . Though, again, different strokes for different folks, I understand why people who want to really customize everything might want to do just that.

I'm a dev, not a sysadmin. I like coding, not hunting down configuration settings. A browser, text editor, a terminal, git, postgres, bash/zsh, dev tools, a package manager and I am happy and could care less about the desktop chrome.

BSDs are many things, but from my vague understanding (and respect) for the subject, they are not easy desktop machines for the ignorant.

i.e. Why impose your worldviews on others?

Do you DARE? Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty

I wonder if we could know more about the governance model for the funding:

- is it an EU grant kinda thing where you this elaborate bureaucratic process to access funds but are hard to turf out later?

- is it a Silicon Valley (oft-intended for imitation) VC system, where you fail fast? If so, what's the oversight to protect taxpayers from abuse? (own-pocket VCs are extremely motivated)

i.e. it could be a very good idea and that's not a whole lot of money. But what's going to keep it from porking up?

Uncle Sam mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens

Re: LOL, with what?

Y'all remember when Oracle got whacked for over-licensing the state of California to a ridiculous extent?

Wonder if there are some unnecessary licenses for it in the Feds? Esp. comparing the price of one WinZip to one Oracle.

No, let's wake up here. Ellison is best buds with this lot. Nothing to see, citizen, move along now.

Re: Good...

There's this South African guy who is relentlessly hunting down government waste and unnecessary expenses.

Time to put him on the case, he'll sort this idiocy out in a jiffy </sarcasm>!

Trump says US should kill CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

Re: Sooo

I don't live in the UK. But if I did, I'd be chuffed at a party "conspiring" to get back into the EU.

Brexit has been a massive disaster, conducted on the basis of a 2% margin non-binding referendum. Polling indicates as such https://www.statista.com/statistics/987347/brexit-opinion-poll/

So would uncovering such intents be the sign of conspiracy theory thinking? As long as a party campaigned on that intent, once it was ready, why would it?

Equally true, I'd expect a true Brexity paper to think rather ill of it.

Re: Sooo

> What is odd is that Trump campaigned on bringing back jobs and manufacturing to America

Which makes St. Petersburg Lad here on point for applauding this move. Though his eloquence could use (a lot of) work. Guess when you're getting paid in rubles to post, you have to be efficient and copy paste from past "insights".

Framework Desktop wows iFixit – even with the soldered RAM

Not impressed all that much and I think we've seen coverage casting doubt on the "improvements" from soldered RAM.

But keep in mind that on a system intended to keep for years and years, RAM is often tied in practice to the motherboard in question. 3-4 years out one may find it more practical to swap out the entire motherboard rather than paying extra for outdated RAM.

In the short/medium term, yes, a nasty practice. Considered over longer upgrade cycles, not necessarily as bad.

Last, at least with Apple, one aspect that is galling is how much they price their RAM over market prices. That was previously a motivation for buying a minimum-spec machine and then buying aftermarket RAM. One successfully discouraged by soldering.

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Re: The language they use is terrible

Oh, while the language might be vague, diffing the before and after content of those clauses, as done here, is clarity itself.

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

I have repeatedly seen wellness studios here with billboards advertising "quantum healing" or the like (emphasis on "quantum" being present).

Wonder if we could sue them as well, for good measure?

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

Re: Wake up call!

Hmmm, you actually contradict yourself there, case you didn't notice.

Had France zapped the Exocets on UK say-so, who's to say it wouldn't zap French-sourced missiles on UK warships on someone else's say so? You sell gear to someone kinda means you ought not to backdoor it on a 3rd party's behalf.

Plus, the situation is a bit more nuanced than you claim here https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17256975

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

Imagine all the lovely license n support fees.

Why, Oracle could always argue that since every American's data is on it, then that means license fees for 330M users.

Yum!

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Anyone else think the "Code of Conduct" shit is a tad over the top?

This controversy is an interesting technical and organizational tug of war, and despite leaning towards the "Rust-good" side of things myself, calling Rust a cancer, while histrionic and alarmist, really doesn't qualify as harassment of anyone.

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Good job tovarich. Gotta work in "fascist" as much as you can, that's Kremlin 101.

Not sure you should be using "Emperor" for Trump tho. That doesn't make him look very democratic. But good calling out UK being a bit nosy here, gotta normalize Kremlin snoops.

DOGE geek with Treasury payment system access now quits amid racist tweet claims

Oh, come on. You need to ask your supervisor in St. Petersburg for a bit more time to write an elaborate post.

This looks like you're just stirring the shit. I mean you are not even bothering to defend the noble and genius nullptr.

"Winning" by itself leaves us wanting to hear more of your insights. Maybe, "Winning, winning", at least? Pretty please.

Poland’s 2nd astronaut brings pierogi to the ISS party

Any good restaurants you can recommend in St. Petersburg? For when your government doesn't treat visitors as hostages, I mean?

Trump admin seeks to reclassify federal CIOs, opening door to political appointees

Re: Political appointees as CIOs - what could possibly go wrong?

Very Stable Genius 2.0 is playing. He's incredibly thin skinned, drunk on power and adulation and thinks he is right in everything and can do no wrong.

And, for all that the Dems should have been stopped Biden from running due to his age, Trump is really, really, old. He was never that great a person to start with, but now you can probably add serious cognitive decline to the mix. Since he's a naturally gifted genius at campaigning and manipulation that decline didn't matter that much on the campaign trail. Governing is another thing entirely.

Keep in mind too that the Reps used the 4 years in the wilderness to gather all sorts of fellow travelers. He may senilitize himself into oblivion but there will be the angry Bannons of the world to pick up the banner.

Re: It's week two.

Nah, the action ain't at the 14th, invading Canada or Greenland or annexing Gaza. Not at this time and possibly not ever.

It's here, in the trenches. Fire any one in the government that disagrees with him and cow the rest into submission. Defund any departments that stand in his way - wait till next budget. Tariffs to bully nations into not opposing him. "Reform" the electoral system so the next election will have the "correct" results. Make sure SCOTUS is staffed with younger conservatives so that Trumpism endures.

Maybe, later, we'll see Hague-relevant stuff. But American democracy would be lost long before it gets that far.

Keep the Dems too busy chasing their tails decrying things that he'll never do at this time. Keep them from pushing back on the actual levers of power. So far, working rather well.

Very well calculated to make Trump look like a loonie.

Congratulations on the improved vocab, tovarich, those English lessons in St. Petersburg paid off well, I was wondering if "winning" was the extent you could manage ;-)

FBI's secret UFO hunters fear Trump's January 6 purge will send them into orbit

Re: Crazies?

You know, this would be a tad more convincing if Trump wasn't the first POTUS to muse on the possibility of self-pardon, back in 2020.

Also, maybe Biden was out of line, but Trump 1.0 was pretty above the norms for nepotism, was it not?

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

Re: "they really do not need the money"

Come on, stop with this slander. It's not as if either of the two are in any way shape or form remotely been involved with cryptocurrencies.

Oh, wait...

Re: DOGE

Obviously, ditching the government is an excellent idea as long as it applies to services other folks need and things other folks care about.

Now, let's hear you repeat the above when your car falls off a badly maintained bridge. More generally, when Musk has Twitter-CEO-ed the government to the point where nothing works.