Posts by ckm5

WTF? Value of Finnish open-source-as-a-service startup Aiven jumps $1.2bn in 7 months

Alternative to Redhat

This is basically an alternative to paying RedHat for CYA contracts. Now that they are IBM, everyone is looking for a alternative.

The splitting image: Sufferer of hurty wrist pain? Logitech's K860 a potential answer

Re: MS Sculpt, anyone?

Logitech makes the MS keyboards & mice, so not surprising... It would be surprising if they didn't design them as well...

VC's paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let's have a look at that

CapEx is peanuts compared to the cost of people

The reality is that it takes fewer people to run cloud infrastructure than on-prem. And that alone will blow away any on-prem cost savings. I've heard this argument alot in the last 10 years from a variety of B-series startup people but it never includes the TCO, just capex vs cloud opex.

My guess is that A16Z will shortly announce a 9 figure investment in an 'on prem cloud' startup.....

Penguin takeover: We tried running some GUI Linux apps on Windows the official way – and nothing exploded

Re: Why?

A huge amount of developers work in either Windows or MacOS as there are a lot of tools that only work on those platforms. Whether that is good or bad is largely a religous debate, the reality is that it is a fact of life.

The result is a lot of people write code on Win/Mac that eventually runs on Linux - Python, Java, Node, Go, etc are all x-platform and not Linux specific.

Re: Comparisons please? Benefits please?

Tons of people work like this - it is a major use-case for using MacOS (e.g. unix underneath).

The only people that don't recognize this are hermits in caves....

SpaceX's Starlink: Overhyped and underpowered to meet broadband needs of Rural America, say analysts

Re: They will be competing with fixed 5G, not 1.5 Mb rural DSL

There was a footnote in one of the analyst reports that the peer networking between LEO satellites is significantly faster than fiber over long distances, so much so that it is competitve vs dedicated fiber for high-frequency trading.

Given how much traders spend on fast links, I suspect there is a pretty good profit for Starlink catering to that crowd....

Re: What's the problem?

There are TONS of people moving out of cities right now with more than enough money to afford $99/mo to work remotely.... This has been going on since March 2020

Re: And the point is?

Note - downtown SF has terrible broadband, way worse than Starlink for many people. In fact, that is true for most of Slicon Valley as well - at best people have OK cable as their only provider. I would not use anywhere in the SF Bay Area as a benchmark for broadbad.

Most of the decent (aka fibre) infrastructure is in new-ish large subdivisions, most of which are not even in California....

Outsourced techie gets 2-year sentence after trashing system of former client: 1,200 Office 365 accounts zapped

Only 2 years?

Some random drug dealer on the street would get more than that. He affected at least 1000 people, never mind the citizens who couldn't get or missed services....

Should have been way more.

OVH flames scorched cloud customers with pledge to build data centre fire simulation lab

Re: The backup is on top of the cabinet ...

Depends on the risk assessment. If you are in a place with mass-scale events like earthquakes, then 25 miles is too close. At a previous employer, our US West Coast systems are backed up by systems in the middle of the country.

IMHE this is realatively easy & cheap to do with fully-cloud native applications & infrastructure. In our case, we had a complete replicate of our infrastructure on "cold standby" replicated for less than $500/mo with continous data backups to a distributed infrastructure and daily full snapshots. And, yes, we tested it 2x/year - took 15 min to spin up the replica.

So, bye-bye mighty nerd haven Fry’s, took Silicon to the Valley... and now you must die

You have more patience than me - I'd never wait, esp since 1/2 the stuff was repackged returns and generally retail-ish price. When it became possible to order stuff and get in a few days, I stopped buying there and just stop there to kill time.

i'm not surprised. Ive also heard that the crazy decor was done by a family member (wife?) of one of the founders who wanted to be a set designer....

There was a time when Fry's had everything & then some, even the kitchen sink. With the rise of e-commerce, they started having sourcing issues and that was the death knell.

I used to stop by the Palo Alto store a lot, but I haven't been there in a while, didn't know it was closed.... Wonder what I'll do if we ever have in person meetings again and I have time to kill....

P.S. The only MicroCenter in Silly Valley closed about 10 (?) years ago....

Chill out, lockdown ain't over yet – perhaps FUZIX on the Pi Pico could feature in your weekend shed projects

Re: Young people these days...

I actually have one of these.....

What's CNAME of your game? This DNS-based tracking defies your browser privacy defenses

Re: We've just upgraded your internet to default security AAA+ at no extra charge!

A lot of ISPs sell DNS data to advertisers, some of them also inject ads into the pages you request.

Not sure that any ISP is your friend.

Re: Smug bastard is smug.

A lot of sites no longer rely on cookies as they are unreliable. There are tons of other ways of tracking browsers whether you allow it or not:

- Browser Fingerprinting

- IndexDB

- Local Storage

- DNS Queries

Some of these methods may or may not work depending on a wide variety of factors, not all of which are under your control....

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

Re: Not a backdoor

The are not usually updated as places like what the OP is describing consider all electronics vulnerable and isolate them completely from pretty much everything.

If you're a WhatsApp user, you'll have to share your personal data with Facebook's empire from next month – or stop using the chat app

Good thing I deleted WhatsApp years ago....

Still have people asking to use it .... I'm sure the founders are rolling over on their piles of money....

Google told BGP to forget its Euro-cloud – after first writing bad access control lists

Re: Clouds are great!

Great, now with your hybrid, no one can be accountable and you have twice the expense with 4x the complexity. That's a wonderful solution, if you work for Accenture....

Having built a couple of DCs for F500s in a previous life, I'd much rather use one or more cloud providers. Easier to deploy, more secure, way more reliable, easier to expand & update and far cheaper.

But hey, whatever. I don't have to live with what you build, thankfully....

Re: Resilience

Every single one of your internal systems relies on the internet to function. Unless you air-gap everything (thus making it useless in the modern world) your arguement is falacious.

Re: Clouds are great!

I ran ops for $23b of projects and was the CTO of the Linux Foundation. I can safely say that unless you are one of the tech giants, your arguement for security is an illusion. The big cloud vendors have 10x more people working on security than every F500 company put together and they are fighting off nation-state resource-level attacks (and mostly winning) every minute.

And if you think that rolling your own systems isn't complex, you are fooling yourself. Just look at the number of packages on your Linux distro and show me a code trace of all the contributors. And that is just _one_ system with _one_ piece of software..... And that's assuming anyone on your staff is even capable of understand how things work.

Re: Clouds are great!

@anonymous (yeah, I know) What you are very effectively pointing out is that a lot of people (including you) don't understand the first thing about making cloud deployments reliable. As @doublelayer & @xamol are both trying to explain to you, it is quite easy to make cloud deployments far more reliable than anything on-prem.

The main issue is that people like you keep thinking that on-prem is the ultimate in reliablity when it clearly is not when compared to a correctly architected cloud deployment. At least not for anything but the very largest organizations (cf DCs in > 2 geos + competent staff to maintain 24/7/365 + significant opex budgets)

The fact is that cloud failures are public events with subsequent investigations of root causes, hence data availability for reliability is (relatively) public. With on-prem, you and I have no idea and there is no accountability.

Re: Resilience

This - it is VERY easy to build redundancy in cloud implementations. I've done it in 4 companies and several startups. The cost isn't particularly high unless you are doing active-active, easily less than $4k/month and as low as a few hundred.

Really, there is no excuse not to do this other than either laziness or just being clueless about how cloud infrastructure works.

Fundamentally, despite what all the haters believe (and it is only belief), it's far easier to build a secure, scalable & redundant system in the cloud that it is on-premise.

Re: Clouds are great!

Because failures NEVER happen when you are running things out of your basement.....

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

I use Firefox with uBlock and it seems to catch most of the ads. For YouTube, I have uBlock with AdBlock for Youtube....

Works well enough - and I use 1.1.1.1 for DNS

Re: A simple answer

That's been happening for well over a decade. Click-fraud is a real thing, which is why a lot of advertisers only pay per click....

Re: The rise of Facebook and the slow death of journalism is due to online ads

Touche - I read it for enterainment, although the comments are often a good indicator of what the right-wing conservative hive mind is thinking....

Re: Counter productive

You'd think that ad-blocking would actually improve CPMs as it is a signal that the user is not interested in the ad, further segmenting the audience....

Re: "server-side tagging"

That's the whole point, AFAIK. If you are adding tracking tags at the server side then they can't be blocked. It also lessens the load on the browser massively.

Here is a pretty good explaination - https://www.internetrix.com.au/blog/the-benefits-and-limitations-of-server-side-tagging-in-google-tag-manager-gtm/

Re: Keep on AdBlocking

Mozilla still makes over $400m/year - if that is not enough to keep a browser going, there is something wrong....

Re: Nothing wrong with ads ...

I use Ublock Origin and AdBlock for YouTube on my desktop - haven't seen an ad in years other than some homepage banner style ads. On my iPad, I'm always shocked at the quantity of ads and how disruptive they are to the user experience....

HPE to move HQ from Silicon Valley to Texas, says Lone Star State is 'attractive' for recruitment, retaining staff

Re: A clever way to turn over the older workforce

Anyone with 1/2 a brain is not working for HPE anyway - like someone said upthread, no one in Silicon Valley wants to work for them, so they pretty much had to move.

Re: There's some low corperate taxes there as well

The downside is huge property taxes. I know several people who move out of Texas because of this.

Re: Texans are gonna love this

Pretty much all the cities in Texas are blue. Houston has had a gay mayor and Austin is almost as liberal as San Francisco.

Just like at the national level, it's pretty much only gerrymandering and an electoral system that favors rural voters that keeps Republicans in power....

This.

HPE has huge problems recruiting here in CA as they can't really afford to pay people a living wage. It's a result of them being a barely profitable company. Good riddance, I say. HP hasn't been the same since they sold off their testing business.

Re: Houston...

Nope, sorry. Weather, property taxes, hurricanes. No thanks. Good riddance, you can have HPE.

Re: Texans are gonna love this

The Fremont factory was built 100 years ago..... It's predecessor was the Chevy Oakland assembly plant, built in 1915...

Heck yeah, we should have access to our own cars' repair data: Voters in US state approve a landmark right-to-repair ballot measure

Re: Cars collect some interesting data...

That's a calculated value and uses other data to figure that out. It can also use electrical consumption data at startup to calculate compression in each cylinder.... You can do the same manually with an oscilloscope.

Re: Cars collect some interesting data...

That's only the data you can easily see - if you have access to the Toyota scantool, you can also see acceleration, speed, g-force and all kinds of sensor data. Some cars even store GPS coordinates of each action, but even whithout that, there is a wealth of other data like altitude, wheel orientation, etc.

Weight of the passenger is what turns the passenger airbag on & off....

Edit: depending on the year, your Corolla might also have a black box that records data just before an accident - it is only accessible by Toyota but it's come up in a number of lawsuits.

Microsoft to rethink crash-prone Visual Studio extension model, shift towards cloud

Re: Extensions are "difficult to write"

MS Office extensions are now written in Javascript, don't know what's worse...

After figuring out that hope is not a strategy, SAP has a new one: We're gonna shift on-prem customers to the cloud!

Re: Security and cost

Anyone who thinks their on prem systems are more secure than cloud systems is fooling themselves. If you are connected to the internet in any way, you are vulnerable & a target.

The difference between cloud & on prem is that one has hundreds (thousands?) of engineers solely focused on securing systems and the other has maybe a dozen. I'll leave it up to the reader to figure out which is likely to be more secure and who has the experience/resources needed to fend off the most sophisticated rogue & nation-state attackers...

As far as cost - it's all about application architecture, the cost is not 1-1 as, in a properely architected cloud application you only pay for surge capacity when you need it instead of 24/7/365....

California outlaws wording, webpage buttons designed to hoodwink people into handing over their personal data

Re: What about my least favorite dodge?

According to this, they would have to take exactly the same steps to opt you in....

Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches for a 'complete virtualization stack' with Linux and Hyper-V

Re: The way forward?

Linux has already won that if you include Android since mobile usage surpassed desktop a while ago....

Who cares what Apple's about to announce? It owes us a macOS x86 virtual appliance for non-Mac computers

Re: Do what?

You can buy Xeons in the iMac Pro and Mac Pro

https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/specs/

You can buy a Mac Pro with a 28 core Xeon

https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/

Who told you it wasn't possible to get a Mac with a Xeon?

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: Perhaps

Or you could use scrails

Aka, screws driven by a nail gun....

You're welcome ;-)

Ubiquiti, go write on the board 100 times, 'I must validate input data before using it'... Update silently breaks IDS/IPS

Re: "This is a beta service for [their security] products"

I use a USG and IDS/IPS is clearly labeled as beta. I don't have it turned on as a slows the device down 10x and, after running it for a month, I just wasn't picking up any 'threats'.

SoftBank: Oi, we paid $32bn for you, when are you going to strong-Arm some more money out of your customers?

Re: IMHO $32B is not reasonable

That's not really how investors think. It's all about P/E ration and, at 16x, it's actually reasonable for a software company, which ranges from 10 to 20....

USA ends Hong Kong's special treatment, crimping flow of tech to territory

What this is has done is to make it abundantly clear the the Chinese government doesn't give to shits about either it's people or democratic principles. The democratic & free world was willing to give China the benefit of the doubt while it modernized as it was thought that capitalism & wealth would lead to more democratic tendencies.

Between this, wholesale theft of IP, extinction of minorities and expansionism in the South China Sea, it's pretty clear what Whinnie the Pooh thinks their trajectory should be. There is no reason to be accommodating anymore.

It's actually quite sad. China had a moment in time where it could have become a great country, instead it decided that the worst kind of dystopic, intrusive totalitarianism and repression was the way forward. Fundamentally, when the regime is scared of it's people, it's because they are weak...

So Darned Kind of you, Facebook: SDK bug sends popular iOS apps crashing earthwards

Re: yet another reason to not use ZuckBook

That's just stupid - it means that $insert_small_cash_strapped_company_here is responsible for keeping your PII secure and we all know how well that will go....

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

I have a Brother

I've been through several brands incl. Epson & HP. I now have a Brother all-in-one - it's my second one, I only upgraded to get double-sided printing and an auto-feeder....

Otherwise, dead reliable, cheap 3rd party ink and does pretty much everything without fuss. Never had a problem with ink drying up and it sometimes goes months between printing, although it will randomly auto-clean.... Also, works perfectly with a Mac as a printer & scanner.