Posts by coredump

Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027

Yup. Particularly when you don't actually care if the customer-victims are satisfied or not.

HR may have to cajole and soothe reluctant employees to get them to use AI

Re: HR leaders

It never occurred to me that Gartner has their own HR managers. I suppose I always assumed if they ever needed such things that they outsourced to some other consultancy outfit.

... and then presumably double-charged themselves for the referral.

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Re: Microsoft believes the world needs only two mail providers...

Well, only one, really. But Google believes the same thing.

Thing is, they're both wrong.

Re: I dont believe it...

TIL Namecheap offers email service. :-)

I've been using them to register domains for a few years, after finally switching off Network Solutions (should have done it much earlier), but hadn't looked at Namecheap's other offerings. Not an immediate need but might be useful down the road, so cheers for that.

Re: OVH

> SPF, DKIM, DMARC and all the other items in place. They still ignore it.

I've seen similar from gmail and (occasionally) yahoo mail as well. While being pretty permissive about spammy content originating from their own networks and domains.

Aside from the technical causes, I suspect part of the motivation is Microsoft and Google simply wanting to preserve their walled gardens. The concentration of email service into a small number of providers' hands is worrisome.

BunsenLabs Carbon keeps the CrunchBang flame alive with Debian 13

Re: The Original CB

Not the first time I've heard a story like that about OpenStack, I've no reason to doubt it. However, it makes me glad I don't need to support such a thing.

systemd doesn't solve any unique problems in the infrastructure here, and (admittedly in the past) caused more than its share of new problems. I'm not interested in sticking with it longer than necessary just to see what happens next.

Re: The Original CB

> Devuan is _considerably more_ work than Debian. So, if you are not _strongly_ ideologically motivated, it's not worth it.

Yes, this was basically my initial experience with Devuan, and not a lot changed for me circa Debian 13 vs. Devuan 6.1. I dunno if I'd say "considerably more" but I do agree "more". I like the idea of Devuan, but if I'm going to make another Linux switch it's probably going to be something outside the family tree.

I'm admittedly used to Debian at this point (after switching from CentOS some years ago) so its rough-ish edges and "set this bit up yourself" parts don't bother me, now that we have docs and procedures established. I expect this is also why I find Alpine to be pretty good.

OTOH most production gear here is running FreeBSD nowdays; some of it always has been (decades), and the Debian has been getting replaced with FreeBSD over the last year or so. Repeat comments about rough-ish edges and procedures.

Even though I don't want systemd in production here, I'm not quite ready to be entirely done with Linux yet, so I recently decided to stand up a test system to see if Alpine can replace Debian for some network services infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, NTP, etc.). FreeBSD has already replaced most Debian, I'd kinda like to keep a Linux presence too, and Alpine seems like it may work out.

> Most of the sysadmin types I know _like_ systemd. They say it makes their lives easier.

IME that's generational or something along those lines. Most of the sysadmin folks I work(ed) with eventually developed a grudging reluctant acceptance of systemd; we got used to it, but never liked it. Most of us came from Unix originally, and Red Hat (no E) Linux or similar early distributions.

Other folks didn't mind systemd per se, but they weren't especially excited about it either. Most of them came to Linux either from a modern-ish distro, or from Windows/helpdesk, so they took systemd more or less as a given, never having been really exposed to other things.

That said, they weren't any more pleased about the occasional 1-2minute shutdown delays from earlier systemd versions than we were, just as an example. Those folks don't seem to be as troubled by the systemd creeping features, however. Whether they genuinely don't see it as a problem or they've merely gotten to the grudging acceptance phase like we did, I dunno.

I'm less bothered by systemd technical issues in Debian 12/13 that we fought in CentOS 7/8; it's the ongoing embrace-extend behavior which concerns me.

> It is a little odd that there is this loosely linked group of tools coming from the Freedesktop group where most of them work for RH...

I don't find that "odd" at all. Tinfoil hat or no, I don't believe that's a coincidence -- that's enemy action. Or marketing. Or both. ;-)

Not a fan of flatpak either, btw. Whether pkg, apt/deb, or apk, I make do OK with the native repositories that came with the OS.

Re: The Original CB

It's slightly interesting that an Alpine base might be acceptable, but Devuan isn't interesting, since both share the same trait of un-systemd.

Though it sounds like they're not anti-Devuan per se, merely that they've already got a Debian-based version going and don't see an advantage to Devuan.

The simple fact is that some folks, perhaps even most Linux distribution assembler/developers, don't view systemd the same way as some of us around these parts. Which is fine -- their distro, their work, their call.

:shrug: indeed.

Re: An alpine-based version of CB++ sounds very interesting

Well done for helping to connect the dots, there. Anything which might help Alpine along a bit more is a good thing.

CIOs say AI adoption is moving faster than they can manage

Re: Make your mind up

> just making stuff up as they go along

Hrm, when the AI^H^HLLM's do this sometimes they call it "hallucinating", which seems pretty charitable.

When the human's do it there are other less flattering terms, e.g. "lying".

Jack Dorsey’s fintech outfit Block announces 40% layoffs, blames AI, gets 23% stock bump

Re: 40%

All true enough. Though the analysis is generally based on the notion that Jack will still own the place in 4 quarters or so. Or at least a non-trivial amount of shares.

It's not impossible he'll have sold out by then. Not a sure thing of course, but I wouldn't bet against it either.

E.g. one of the common reasons for layoffs is pumping the share price, so the Big Bosses can cash out, collect their Big Bonuses, and so on. Another frequent reason is to cut headcount costs in preparation for selling the company.

Smaller payroll, fewer encumbered expenses, etc. make it a more attractive takeover target.

40%

"repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale"

Having been around several "1000 cuts" corporate death marches, some which stretched on for multiple quarters and others seemed to become an ongoing corporate ritual, I can understand the sentiment he's pretending to make with that statement.

But I daresay that a 40% cut is going to be "destructive" no matter how you do it, Jack.

And don't act like this is anything but trading headcount for short term stock price. It's hardly a new scheme/scam, you aren't the first and you won't be the last, because this sort of thing often happens in waves -- Big Bosses tend to follow and mimic each other's behavior, especially when there's a share price pump involved.

ServiceNow boasts its AI bot is resolving 90% of its own help desk tickets

From the pro-A1 management perspective the end result is even better than that: 90% of the hacked off 99% will remember what a useless waster it was, and they'll never bother trying again.

"Look, our incoming call volume is down too! The AI chatbot is *amazing*!"

Well, yes.

Problem is, from management and accounting's perspectives, "customer satisfaction" is hard to count. Whereas minutes per call (tickets closed per day, etc.) is easy. The fact that it's a nearly useless metric doesn't matter.

IME once management gets enamored of "metrics" (business school word for "counting stuff", apparently) things are going to start going downhill -- "Managing by the numbers" is apparently favored over knowing the business, understanding your team's mission, talking to people, and so on.

I didn't come up with it, but "Metrics Minded Micro Managers" was a term I heard used.

If A1 were going to replace anyone, seems like it ought to be management types who believe "count stuff" is how to do their job. Computers ought to be able to work that out well enough, and presumably cheaper and round the clock, eh? To say nothing of the Big Wheel Executives who appear to be just making it up as they go along (another form of "hallucination", perhaps?) -- they're even more expensive, including when they're finally shown the door to "spend more time with family".

Cisco turns to titanium spoons and sand dunes to build a better … box?

Re: is Pure struggling?

So apparently it's just the marketing department struggling. Got it -- thanks.

is Pure struggling?

I don't much follow the storage industry these days, but abandoning an established brand name for something longer, with more syllables, harder to remember, easier to confuse with other brand names, and apparently already in use by another company, seems like an own goal.

Was Pure Storage really in such dire straits that this seemed business critical?

I mean, when "Network Appliance" officially rebranded as "NetApp" that seemed at least somewhat sensible, since that's how many customers called them anyway.

When Dell bought EMC iirc there was some fumbling in the product line branding, like Dell-EMC or something similarly clumsy, but nothing fatal.

Further back, "Silicon Graphics" became "SGI", but that was about like the "NetApp" thing, as I recall.

The various HP renamings were mostly results (fallout?) of corporate selloffs and splits and such. You can argue about the merits and success, but at least there was a reason.

So what was the driving reason behind "Everpure"? A suspicious person might conclude the Chief Marketing Officer has staged a coup....

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

It seems like a tossup whether they believe their hype or are merely trying to ride the con, taking advantage of those who believe.

It can be a tricky problem, sorting the true believers from the hucksters.

GhostBSD to ditch Xorg for XLibre as Red Hat's Wayland crusade leaves X11 fans out in the cold

> As I wrote recently, it looks like FreeBSD 15.1 will support installation of KDE Plasma directly from the installer:

> The thing is, I don't personally want KDE.

Indeed no, me neither. I'd have rather seen FreeBSD focus on XFCE but maybe it's not as popular or something.

Perhaps the notion that one can already get XFCE working on FreeBSD, albeit with some fiddling, makes it less of a priority; i.e. for the initial big project, they want to focus on providing something "automatic", particularly during the installer session as you noted again, than another howto about setting up a WM (vs. a DE).

And, maybe the target audience for this is more like folks who aren't already using FreeBSD; the rest of us usually won't mind a bit of faffing about to get things setup how we want. </speculation>

Nothing against GhostBSD, I may even try it out at some point. But I have more servers than graphical systems, so it's not top priority around here.

Not that installing a desktop necessarily needs to be a long-term commitment, but I think I'd be inclined to see what the FreeBSD Foundation's laptop et al project comes up with, before diving into GhostBSD +Xlibre too much.

Even if it takes some faffing about to get my XFCE setup on regular FreeBSD, that seems like a ... safer(?) platform for the time being.

I don't care to get into the politics of Xlibre or the maintainer, as that's been done elsewhere; but I do wonder about future prospects and stability of the fork. I'm content to wait and see for a while.

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

Re: I keep all my PWs in a text file called passwords.txt on the desktop

If it adds to actual security all, e.g. by circumstance and delay, I consider that bonus points.

The (admittedly probably marginal) win is that it might irritate some potential burglar a bit.

OTOH at that point they might jam the key in, regardless of fit, and snap it off just for spite.

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘more competent who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens’ will take over Linux one day

Re: Vultures

And he did, for a bit. Eg. an internet search claims Linus made a salary on the order of $1M while at Transmeta, circa 2016.

Scale that up by a decade since, and you can approximate a guess at a modern salary.

I suspect he'd prefer to carry on doing what he's already doing, though.

Re: Vultures

> Linus probably has one of the worst jobs in the world, huge amoumts of pressure to get things done.

I wonder, if asked, if Linus would agree with that.

I mean, I imagine he has no serious lack of material things these days, he likely has enough fame (infamy?) or at least name-recognition, if he even wants such things.

I suspect if Linux didn't like doing his job he could probably stop. While I obviously don't know him personally at all, from the outside it doesn't look to me like he's seriously stressed, and any pressure that exists is probably of his own making -- i.e. his own standards and practices.

Maybe I'm completely off the mark and Linus is actually a nervous wreck stress-ball, but I tend to doubt it.

Re: 19.19

I suspect the Linux maintainers wouldn't let such things devolve to becoming an issue.

I sincerely hope I'm not wrong about that.

Re: 19.19

American or otherwise, the people in favor of MMDDYYYY are simply wrong.

It doesn't work properly with 'sort' on filenames, for starters. As a mostly retired sysadmin, I still care that my logfiles and such are organized that way.

[chuckling to myself a bit, but not really kidding at all]

19.19

Maybe instead of version 19.19 being the limit, before "retiring" (or whatever Linus wants to call whatever it is he decides to do then), maybe roll back to 1.0 (or 0?) as his final official act and let GKH or whoever(s) chart a new path from scratch. :-)

Slightly more seriously, there's something to be said for numbering versions with dates, e.g. 20260222 and so on. Aside from being a mouthful to say out loud, it does more or less deal with issues of increasing numbers, and decimals, and e.g. whether version 2.10 comes before or after 2.9 and similar topics.

CIOs told: Prove your AI pays off – or pay the price

Re: doesn't include C-suite

It's sort of a "who watches the watchers" problem, except s/watch/fire/ .

Open source registries don't have enough money to implement basic security

Re: Name and Shame ?

I do. Do you?

Nevermind. I don't really care whether you do or not.

Your accusation of hypocrisy is inaccurate and insulting. Your "boo hoo" is non-sequitur nonsense. Whether I (or you) give, or not, doesn't relieve others like big corporations of any responsibility for giving back also.

Re: Name and Shame ?

Some of those 'big' users are making a (big) profit from others' open source. They're in a much better position to give back to the open source project and developers than your average Linux or BSD hobbyist working on a 2nd-hand decade-old laptop.

Granted, some of them do: e.g. hiring devs, donating to the project (or its foundation) and so on. And that's great. The funds, as well as setting a good example.

I'm not saying every big corporation that runs some Linux in-house is obligated to tithe 20% to Debian or OpenBSD (everybody uses SSH, right?) etc., but some of those outfits are pocketing enormous profits, and the rounding error from their quarterly spreadsheet could make a dramatic difference to some open source projects; especially the ones not backed directly by a corporation of their own.

Plus, giving back to those projects probably helps the company, even indirectly. You'd hope they could be motivated by a little self-interest now and then.

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

Re: Exactly on point

> What they actually have done is to demonstrate how NOT to produce code intended for use in the real world.

Seems like it. And yet, there's reason to believe that delusional (or just plain greedy) executives will take this as a sign that human programmers are not needed.

That's the peril of this kind of thing... not that the code is crappy (though it apparently is), rather that some people will take the entirely wrong lesson from it.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Re: Too much ideology makes Liam unproductive

> That's what FOSS is about, cut investment, fire developers and testers, exploit free labour (or anyway, labour paid by someone else).

No, that's what corporations, owned and run by billionaires, motivated by ruthless greed, are about.

VMware scores early win in Siemens software licensing dispute

Obvious lesson

Never do business with Broadcom. It can only end badly.

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

Re: Update

Your guess is correct IME; to reboot or not is distribution-specific behavior, or at least the default configuration is.

E.g. my couple of remaining Debian hosts are configured to auto install updates, but they don't auto reboot; I could configure them to do so -- there are well-commented options around several reboot scenarios in the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades file for that.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: f*cking cloud

The beancounters in the different cost centre hate it for the same reason, of course.

Re: Browsers.

While I don't openly loathe browsers, I'd have been okay if Usenet were still more of a thing than "WWW".

Re: JIRA

A few companies ago, the devs we supported were allegedly using Jira for their work projects.

After a while, we noticed that none of them ever seemed to refer us to Jira ticket numbers (whatever Atlassian calls them) when they needed something, and when the odd manager would ask us how some project was going (perhaps because they'd heard nothing about it), we found they'd never seen a Jira "user story"(?) or the like either.

Turned out most of the devs were putting in the bare minimum mandatory Jira fields, presumably just enough to make a tick mark in some PM's dashboard, and then apparently never touching it again.

One wonders what the daily stand-ups were like, if they were even happening at all....

Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"

"they wonder how someone who has been using computers since the age of 13 or so and worked in IT his whole life can be, from their point of view, a Luddite."

I have an imperfect answer to that...

If you bang your head against the wall every day, you won't ever learn to like it, but eventually you will get used to it. If the day finally comes when you can stop, the idea of ever doing it again is unthinkable.

The corollary answer is, precisely because you've been in IT your whole life, you know how bad some tech really is, and it's best to have nothing to do with it when you can.

Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"

I still maintain that at least some of devops was a scheme/scam by management and/or finance/payroll to reduce headcount 2:1 or more by making sysadmin types do developer jobs or visa versa.

The concept may have sprung from nobler ambitions (though I have some doubts on that point as well), but once bosses and beancounters got hold of it all was lost.

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

Interesting. My Firefox 147.0.2 on FreeBSD, and Firefox 140.6.0esr on Debian, both have DoH turned off.

I'm guessing that's credit to FreeBSD and Debian rather than Mozilla.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Re: Flying junk

"It would certainly make chartered accountancy datacenter technician a much more interesting job."

Re: IPO Pumping

Agreed in principle, though rather than "anything", I think it's more that they aren't skeptical of the things which they should be deeply skeptical of.

Especially given the source, and when the track record is right there. Self driving cars, robotaxis, etc.

Workday reveals around 400 staff soon won't have to work another day

Generally the same opinion here.

The only comparable experience I can think of at the moment is ADP, and it was essentially the same thing, at least for what I needed. E.g. setup pay check direct deposit, download a tax form, etc.

Seems like such everyday mundane activities that no outfit should be able to bungle them, and yet it apparently still happens.

WorkDay might be worse than Teams in some ways, at least wrt UI and "workflow" or whatever they call it.

I've only had to deal with WorkDay at one $JOB as an end-user and it was... okay. At least my paychecks ended up in the right places, which is about the minimum you'd expect or accept. This was admittedly years ago, I've little doubt it has degraded since then.

But I'd still say Teams (Sharepoint, AD, the whole Microsoft "ecosystem") is more insidious. And harder to get rid of, because it's so firmly rooted into IT thinking and behavior; it's basically viral.

CentOS is coming to RISC-V soon if you have the kit

I've been done with CentOS for a while, but well done to them anyway. Presumably it means Alma and Rocky will follow, and I imagine it helps the other Linuxes (Alpine) too in various ways.

There are no firm plans for RISC-V kit around here but it's always good to see un-X86 things progress now and then.

I haven't shopped for RISC-V systems in the lab, but if something small (akin to RPi or ITX) were available it might be worth a look, especially if there is decent FreeBSD and/or NetBSD support.

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Re: afterlife

> Though Musk missing the satire and humanity

There are probably definitions for people like that.

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Re: From available evidence below...

It might be interesting to hear what they think of their decision a decade+ later, after all that's happened.

Re: systemd and its journey towards taking over the world !!!

Thanks for the Friday flashback. :-) I think the first (and maybe last?) time I directly edited /etc/rc.local (or equivalent) was SunOS 4.1.3 . As I recall, there really weren't many other mechanisms back then to change e.g. daemon startup flags and args and such.

We didn't have that many Suns though -- it was mostly an SGI shop -- so I'll freely admit I may not have been following BCP for the time.

Re: Honest question

I can't say I've *never* fiddled with init scripts, but it has been a very (!) long time since I actually needed to. Circa RHEL3 or 4 or perhaps even Red Hat (no bloody E) Linux.

And even then, I think "fiddling" is up for discussion. E.g. temporarily tacking a "-x" on the end of the interpreter to see what it's getting up to, or a couple strategically placed echo for some printf style debugging; but nothing which fundamentally changed what the script was doing, and reverted when I was done.

Now, I have written a couple init scripts for homegrown tools at a previous $JOB; fiddling or not, it wasn't difficult. The script itself was nothing special, working out how and where the K/S symlinks needed to appear, playing nice with 'chkconfig' et al, even absent the man pages it wasn't a huge task.

By contrast, trying to do something which I thought should be pretty straightforward ("run this thing after the network is up") was apparently considered out of bounds by the systemd folk -- there is/was a fairly well-known wiki page about the topic back then, and not just a few bug reports which were presumably WONTFIX'd. Maybe things are better now, but back then examples were scarce on the ground, or so simple/trivial as to be not useful.

So IME it's not necessarily about how often you need to do something; to me it's also about how much of a chore it is to work it out when you need to.

Re: Honest question

Except it's not entirely an honest question, is it.

I mean, you started with a Bandwagon Fallacy, and followed with the claim that a corporation wasn't driving systemd adoption, when that's what Red Hat did by virtue of being the proverbial 800lb gorilla in the Linux room. I think you'll find that many things about today's Linux started with Red Hat in some fashion.

I'll grant that Debian (probably) made their own decision, and I've bemoaned that choice in these forums before. But to think they weren't at least influenced by Red Hat's path seems naive.

If you're genuinely curious how things got to this point, there are stories and anecdotes about what went on inside Red Hat in the early days of systemd, which talk about the internal debates, project managers and marketing motivations etc. Some Debian discussions are out there too.

I've read some of it over the years, it's not too hard to find; I can't speak to the veracity, but I will say they're interesting reading from a historical perspective.

I've theorized before in similar threads that replacing syslog, resolv, ntp, etc. isn't so much Poettering NIH, rather that he couldn't be arsed to work out using them the way he wanted, so he set about writing his own (incompatible, IMO) replacements. End result is the same as NIH though, regardless of motivations.

It might be fine if that's as far as it went, but it didn't stop there. And he doesn't seem to care if he breaks existing setups ("works fine here, WONTFIX"), or shifts blame ("upstream is doing it wrong"), or sometimes even dismisses the reporting person ("you're just doing it wrong").

Intended or not, it tends to come off as rather "my way or the highway". Unsurprising that some of us ended up choosing the latter; I doubt he's noticed, and probably wouldn't care if he did.

The other theory I've heard round these parts and elsewhere, is the Ship of Theseus plan, replacing bits of Linux until it's SystemDOS or the like. Dunno how plausible that might be, but I'm not waiting around for it.

Well explained. "Too tightly integrated" might be more charitably put than some might say, but I believe it's pretty accurate.

We were just reading how it's becoming harder to use certain gui desktop environments (!) without systemd. Talk about "integrated"... how long before login shells start requiring it? </rhetorical, I hope>

And with that tight integration has come the creeping features. It seems as if each new systemd part that comes out is creating a base for some new one coming later. If not directly, then as a systemic replacement of the original Linux bits that were there before.

It's a bit shocking if you ever take a moment to look at all the systemd modules/units/whatever that could be installed if you enabled the lot -- even in a fairly conservative distribution like Debian -- how much of the OS systemd tendrils have gotten into.