Posts by Doctor Syntax

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

Re: not paying Red Hat for RHEL, but getting the majority of the value of RHEL for free.

And the contributions, like all others, will be under GPL2.

Re: Great liberators ??

"shirt term share value"

A typo I'm sure but you've coined a handy new expression - short term value means losing your shirt in the long term.

Re: Well said

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

I think those days disappeared a long time ago.

Re: Great liberators ??

"Don't get it."

Read the first post in this thread and EricM's reply. Remember that EricM is just one of a large number of RHEL users who took a similar approach. Then try again to get it.

"Red Hat was, and is, leaving a lot of money on the table."

But is it? Consider some of the possible scanarios for different customers if the clones closed down.

1. RHEL user for both production and test, training etc - let's call these non-production uses ancillary - no additional money made.

2. RHEL user for production, clone for ancillaries but would be able to afford to convert the latter to RHEL licences - money on table here.

3. RHEL user for production, clone for ancillaries but converting latter to full licences would not be financially affordable , will manage to struggle along with late version clone/CENTOS-stream or some other distro - no additional money to be made.

4. As 3 but decides to use another distro for future projects - no short term gain, likely long term loss as current production purpose reaches EoL.

5. As 4 but decides to actively migrate existing production usage so as not to split work between two distros - complete medium to long term loss

6. As 5 but reluctantly needs to buy extra licence for ancillaries during migration - short term gain followed by loss in medium rather than longer term.

7. Running entirely on clones, could afford to buy licences - money left on table.

8. Running entirely on clones, licences would be unaffordable - no money left on table irrespective of what course of action they take.

9. Not currently RHEL users but were considering it until now - loss of future sales prospects

Those in scenarios 3 - 6 currently using some S/W or H/W product currently RHEL users are likely to be speaking to the vendors of those products in the near future if they aren't already and said vendors likely to be considering their positions already.

So in some scenarios there will have been money left on the table which they could pick up. In others there's no prospect of that happening and in others there's money to be lost in the longer term, especially as 3s slip into 4 or 5.

Whether this is a real money earner in the long term depends on the balance between the scenarios.

My guess would be that there are bonuses to be made in the next quarter or so as the immediate gains are made after which it will be time for the execs to emulate the rest of their customers and move on.

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

Re: Debian?? Really??

".I know there are IBM and RedHat haters out there.."

I think you're missing the point. The objections are that what's happening are, in the long term, damaging to Red Hat, Fedora and Linux as a whole - although Bob has a point in that RH has promoted some awful stuff.

Re: Beautiful? Really?

Not used KDE lately Bob? Running KDE here & it looks pretty much the same as it's done for years.

Re: Beautiful? Really?

It might look dated to you but I'd prefer it to any modern flat and ugly alternative.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Re: Lightning strike borks power conditioner

No plan survives contact with reality.

Moved into new (to us) building in the autumn. Returned from Christmas hols to find a lightening strike had taken out the thyristors in the UPS. The main building power was OK and so was all the equipment. We ran without the benefit of the interrupted UPS for many months. It's not always DNS; sometimes it's the UPS.

Re: If this is the same Mediterranean hotel chain I'm thinking of...

So the disaster can be recovered but only if two weeks have been spent preparing for it.

Seriously - you could only call the exercise a failure if you didn't learn to have regular checks made on the generator fuel. DR exercises are to be learned so that when the D happens for real so does the R.

Whe he turned up on site he Diss appeared.

You've just reminded me there's a weather vane on the house.

Re: Lightning always finds a way... of least resistance.

"for his troubles"

And his long term survival.

You think a strike might animate them?

And nothing too precipitate

Re: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

"She sent them back to him with something pretty unpleasant written across the card."

I hope the flowers were roses with plenty of thorns on the stems.

Startup that charged $1.20 a day for coworking space in nightclubs folds

Re: Friyey could have used JobCenters

Staff still on the wrong side of the counters? 'Twas ever so.

"but the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that guided us will continue to thrive,"

Translation - if any VCs are about we have plenty of other ways to burn their cash.

From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch

Re: what's the biggest different in data privacy/security between UK and EU?

"The EU actually bothers to enforce the rules."

The EU will continue to have rules.

"Anyone who signed an agreement in exchange for severance may owe Twitter ongoing obligations, if that is enforceable."

If it is enforceable at all it would assume the severance was paid.

Re: Twitter's biggest Trade Secret

"The thing that made Twitter worthwhile was that for a long time everyone was there."

Not everyone. Maybe everyone you knew.

Re: Whoever wins ...

The unpleasantness seems to leak out to affect us all.

Ex-Amazon manager jailed for stealing $10M using fake vendor invoices

There's only one silly error really: assuming they can't be caught.

Re: "more crimes while on release after posting bond"

They obviously never got the advice "when you're in a hole stop digging". If they think 16 years is going to be a long sentence they've yet to discover how much umbrage a court will take over forging court papers.

UK's proposed alt.GDPR will turn Britain into a 'test lab' for data harvesting

According to the Computer Weekly article the adequacy agreement also covers law enforcement data. I wonder what the consequences of losing that will be.

Re: Yet..

I'm retired. I no longer run a business. However if I were running a business I might have had to reconsider location. And if I were an employee of a business that depended on trade with the EU and relied on an adequacy situation I'd be very worried indeed. I'm old enough that I can probably see out my time here without too much personal inconvenience.

My children and grandchildren have dual citizenship (as will have any future great grandchildren) so they have a degree of flexibility.

Re: Weird perspective

"Whether we're in or out of the EU (boring subject)"

Only boring if (a) it has no consequences either way or (b) it has bad consequences which it would be embarrassing to have to discuss.

"as anyone who wants to do business with the EU will still have to meet the requirements of the EU GDPR"

And the easiest way of doing that will be by moving to the EU.

Re: turning the UK into a 'test lab' for experimental and abusive uses of data

"the hope is that they'll move here to harvest it."

A vain hope if ever there was one.

Brexit was always obviously a matter of removing citizens' rights wrapped up in jingoism and the deliberately misleading* slogan of taking back control. There's not the least surprise in all this going on. It may benefit a few big businesses in the short to medium term. In the long term it will be more and more difficult for them to squeeze profits from the UK.

* In case you still believed that was to benefit you, take a moment to think who it was who was going to get - and has now got - control and what that control achieved. It wasn't and isn't you and it was to provide protection for the individual.

Brits negotiating draft deal to rejoin EU's $100B blockbuster science programme

The borders were always there. We (usual disclaimer) deliberately moved from one side to the other. The obvious consequences were pointed out and at best ignored, but usually the pointing out was deprecated. What's to sort out?

"even Brexiteers aren't that stupid"

Citation needed.

Re: seeing the way they have punished the UK for wanting to leave

"I wasn't referring to Horizon when talking about the UE trying to punish Britain for leaving."

So you were OT? I know el Reg threads are apt to drift OT. Drift, not take a speedboat.

"I was talking about all the other stuff, which I don't think we need to regurgitate."

In the circumstances it's a bit difficult to work out just what you were talking about.

All the red tape now involved in exports to and imports from the EU? That was there previously. We were inside the red tape envelope previously. We* moved outside. We're now treated exactly the same as non-EU countries always were. Lots of us said it would happen. If its a punishment it's a self-inflicted one.

The ongoing problem with NI? Again, very predictable. The Good Friday agreement required a soft border between NI and the Republic. This was accomplished by NI, as part of the UK, and RI both being in a customs union as part of the EU. The Union (it's signified by the U in UK) required no trade barriers between GB & NI. Those requirements were mutually compatible. So along comes Brexit proposing to remove the UK from the customs union. That created a situation which could not be compatible with both the other two so we have an unstable fudge.

Or were you talking about some other equally foreseeable, self-inflicted consequence of no longer being in the EU for which you which to blame the EU because it's embarrassingly inconvenient to blame the lack of exercise of foresight by leavers. If you were a leaver and now don't like the consequences you have no cause to complain; those of us who weren't have every reason to - about the leavers.

* Some of us unwillingly, of course.

Re: Never forget that the original had the emphasis on "my"

Given that the vote was labelled advisory and in absence of a previous impact assessment it would have been an appropriate reaction to carry one out as a first response to the vote. Instead Cameron panicked.

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

The original Lamborghini, the Miura, was arguably the best looking, if possibly the least practical, road car ever built. Its immediate successors were ugly things. Since then I've paid no attention to them but doubt any ever came close to the original.

"300km is 185 miles, so at least 2.5 hours - which is definitely comfort break territory, and that usually takes quite a few minutes."

There's a couple of further requirement to add to that - there needs to be a vacant charging point available when you stop for that break and the price of the charge doesn't exploit the monopoly situation of a motorway service station.

Your journey that gets broken after 185 miles is probably largely on the motorway. If you're going to get your 80% charge over the period of a typical motorway stop you'll need to be able to park next to a charging point. In order for that to happen once pure EVs form the bulk of the fleet most if not all of the spaces in a motorway car park will need to have chargers. What's more the overall power feed to the service station is going to have to support all those chargers in use - if not the current is going to have to be limited at each charger and you're not going to get your 80% charge. What's the investment needed to get to that point and when is it going to happen.

As far as I can manage it I always arrange long journeys so as not to have to buy petrol at motorway service stations because of the prices. That's usually feasible. Having to break a long journey to recharge means that using motorway chargers would be almost inevitable. It will take strong price controls to stop them getting their hands in our pockets right up to the shoulder. Hybrids migth go some way to keeping them honest.

Boss such a tyrant you need a job quitting agent? It works in Japan

Re: Do emotional support clowns count?

The report mentions support animals. Maybe one that would crap on the carpet on command would be best. Forget emojis, nothing beats reality.

"I don't know if our reporter here has had many jobs, but I can guarantee that working extra hours will almost never earn you a pay rise or promotion either, but now you've wasted half your life working extra hard for no benefit."

I think you're confusing being present with working. The idea of quiet quitting is to do one without the other.

It would be very easy to see this combined with a job search/recruitment agency.

Oh, great. Yet another tech billionaire thinks he can get microblogging right

Re: Funny

"personal support between friends"

There remains the possibility of dialling the friend's number, putting one end of the phone to your ear and talking.

Re: Funny

I think you missed the word "now" in the OP.

No open door for India's tech workers in any UK trade deal

Re: "Negotiating a trade deal will be easy"

Oh, look, another. Or same one with different handle?

Re: Nothing economically beneficial will happen until the Tories get kicked out.

Yes, I'd like to downvote reality too. But it just doesn't work like that.

Re: Nothing economically beneficial will happen until the Tories get kicked out.

As I said above, even ignoring immigration our population has increased because we're living longer but birth rates are falling. That means that the demand for services increases whilst the population supplying those services is shrinking (extending retirement age is unpopular). Household numbers are also increasing because there are more adults living singly.

Whatever your political inclinations those are the demographic trends you have to work with.

What's your solution to balancing those supply and demand factors?

Re: Nothing economically beneficial will happen until the Tories get kicked out.

I think I'd prefer a return to the Danelaw. Slaughtering Lancastrians would be a possibility but the priority would be keeping Wessex and Mercia out.

Re: I want COMPETENT, not cheap workers

ISTM that the Brexiteers were relying a lot of voters not being well-enough educated to indulge in a bit of critical thinking when it came to marking their referendum papers.

Re: "Negotiating a trade deal will be easy"

From what I recall it was political shrills who were making the deal. And remember that we're pretty good here at spotting shills when we see them.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

Poor old Nige might not be able to pay you - he doesn't meet Coutts' wealth standards to keep a bank account there. Maybe someone will have to organise a whip-round for him.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

"Perhaps we have issues with NHS, schools and pretty much everything because our population has increased faster than the services? Perhaps cost of living has increased due to the demand for housing, due to the population increasing faster than the housing stock."

You're looking at an issue which has a lot of dimensions to it. Population is increasing partly because we're living longer, something which I personally can only approve of. It's the ageing end of the population which has increased demand for NHS services.

Increased demand for housing stock is partly due to more people living singly, either not forming relationships or those relationships breaking up so there are more but smaller households.

The increased number of singletons, and the smaller family sizes for those having children means that the birth rate has been low for some time and is now actually below replacement rate so that there are fewer locally-born recruits to provide services - including staffing the NHS and it certainly hasn't helped that we haven't been training enough staff for the NHS for years.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

"Hello day-old single-issue handle."

It's amazing they don't realise we can spot them a mile off.