Posts by Maventi

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

Re: Nice to see these tech types...

But the highschool dropout who could previously get a job working the line, or cleaning floors, or serving customers, or any other number of low-skill jobs that used to exist now can't. They're not going to become a systems reliability engineer, or a network architect, or a full-stack programmer.

Hmm. I'm a both network architect and a highschool dropout. No degree. Just takes a positive attitude, motivation and effort.

A lot of those people didn't drop out because they were lazy, they dropped out because like my father they had severe learning difficulties and they simply weren't ever going to graduate.

Agreed.

JPMorgan exec claims bank repels '45 billion' cyberattack attempts per day

WEF in a nutshell. Hyperbole to justify hubris.

Not even LinkedIn is that keen on Microsoft's cloud: Shift to Azure abandoned

Re: Explains poor reliability

I've had the misfortune of using Azure Stack, and on that basis I can only assume that you're being sarcastic?

Microsoft embraces its inner penguin with Linux-powered Windows AI Studio

Wait, this needs both Linux and Windows to run? I feel like that's almost worse than just one or the other.

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

While I wouldn't touch HP inkjets with a 10 foot pole, we bought a colour HP LaserJet MFC about five years ago for home use and it's been absolutely brilliant. Cheap to run and everything about it just works even on the software side. It's spat out close to 6,000 trouble-free pages to date.

Though admittedly we only have Macs and Linux machines, never tried it with Windows so I can't vouch for the latter. Historically I've had a very good run with Linux support via hplip so that was my incentive to go with the brand.

Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU

Re: UK workarounds ?

That's the problem with Linux on the desktop - you need to resort to a terminal and loads of obscure commands to perform simple operations. Oh, wait...

Millions of Gigabyte PC motherboards backdoored? What's the actual score?

Re: You missed a question.

I wonder if this utilises or is related to WPBT? I suspect that active participation by Windows is partly to blame here; I don't expect that UEFI would be able to forcibly write this file to a local filesystem. But I suppose few things surprise me any more with modern tech, especially from the big players in the industry.

Turing Award goes to Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of the Ethernet

Re: Drop out

If we really want to get pedantic, it's technically 8P8C which is based on but not completely identical to RJ45. :)

Sick of smudges on your car's enormo touchscreen? GM patents potential cure

Re: re: How About

Try setting the timer or clock on a Bosch oven made within the last 12 or so years. Then come back and tell me with a straight face that touch on kitchen appliances is a good idea.

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

No mention of the elephant in the room: remote attestation? Lennart makes brief reference of this in his own post: https://0pointer.net/blog/brave-new-trusted-boot-world.html

This is already being used by popular apps on mobile phones, almost completely killing the custom ROM scene as they aren't 'approved' builds. Windows 11 now requires a TPM.

Apple and CloudFlare have been quietly bringing this to the web as well: https://gabrielsieben.tech/2022/07/29/remote-assertion-is-coming-back-how-much-freedom-will-it-take/

Joining the dots start to create an ugly picture.

Linux kernel 6.1 will contain fixes, features. Useful Rust modules? Not yet

Re: Linux remains an unmade bed

Seems Linux WiFi is stable enough that most devices I have encountered that have anything to do with WiFi implement it in Linux without issue? The majority of access points, routers, mobile phones, plus countless embedded devices? And the occasional laptops, including my daily driver work laptop.

Yes there are some WiFi adapters used on consumer laptops that are a bit flakey, but these make up a pretty tiny portion of Linux WiFi implementations.

Ubuntu Linux 18.04 systemd security patch breaks DNS in Microsoft Azure

Even outside of this patch, DNS resolution was always a bugbear for me on Ubuntu 18.04. I believe that was the release (I only use LTS) they switched to systemd-resolved. For reliability on large-scale deployments I ended up removing systemd-resolved entirely and configuring resolv.conf directly and it ran happily for years.

Fortunately it seems to have improved since 20.04. I feel like there must be other things going on in 18.04 that combine with this recent issue for such a crazy issue to surface like that though.

Oh and Microsoft, blocking a single update in Ubuntu is pretty straightforward - simply hold the package (sudo apt-mark hold <package-name>). How about publishing proper instructions?

Epson says ink pad saturation behind 'end of service life' warning on inkjet printers

Re: and inkjet cartridges dry out in a month or two.

Dye sub rocks! Very happy with the Canon Selphy.

Re: Brother

After over a decade of inkjet shenanigans I bought a HP LaserJet Pro for day to day colour prints, and a Canon Selphy dye-sub printer for the occasional photos. Both have spent several years doing exactly what they say on the box and giving no grief at all.

Microsoft's Teams goes native on Apple, retains a human touch

Re: Nice for all the fruity guys, but what about Linux?

's/the browser/your preferred Chromium front-end/'

Still to this day the only major video conference platform vendor that discriminates on browser engine. In many ways little has changed at Microsoft in the last two decades.

Broadcom's VMware buy got you worried? Give these 5 FOSS hypervisors a spin

The equivalent of VSAN for Proxmox would be Ceph, which Proxmox can deploy and manage for you. Ceph can be a bit complex to learn (Proxmox helps here!) but actually very reliable once it's running.

I'd also echo the above drawbacks regarding about Azure Stack. It's got a familiar UI and API to those already using Azure but that's really the only strong card it has in its hand.

Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

Re: What they do

Yes, and they are well within their rights to do that as they adhere to the respective license terms and maintain attribution where required. They contribute plenty of code back too. It's a two-way street. There's nothing wrong with any of that.

The issue with GitHub isn't so much profit in itself, it's the fact they are taking code, digesting and regurgitating it to others without attribution or following the terms of the licenses the original code was licensed under. That is in pretty stark contrast to Red Hat.

HP pilots paper delivery service for Instant Ink subscribers

Re: having to go buy paper [is] heavy, very painful

Bought one of these also. Just works from any OS (though I haven't tried Windows yet), never had to battle with it to this day. Seems that HP can still make a good printer if you are willing to pay up front.

With that said, if HP's current shenanigans eventually make it to the LJ Pro series then the next printer will be a Brother.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Neat, MacBooks and iPhones will actually ship with the same charge connector. Now that's courage!

Re: Now with the EU rule they will have to replace them after the next phone upgrade.

> Unless they also have at least one non-apple device...

Or a recentish MacBook.

Intel offers 'server on a card' reference design for network security

Problem: Computers are insecure. Solution: Add another computer.

Dear Europe, here again are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly

Well of course, but try explaining all of that to the algorithm scanning your device.

Broadcom's stated strategy ignores most VMware customers

Re: But it's a winning strategy.

> If their top customers are staying with them, those who generate most revenue, it won't matter.

In the short term. As others have said, those big customers came from small ones who gave VMware its original reputation. Kill that foundation layer off, and there's nothing left to grow on. You can only skim the cream for so long. That large base of small customers will migrate and there will be a huge pool of talent out there that no longer has VMware skills or experience. VMware will become that legacy dinosaur product that even the big customers will be trying to migrate off, leaving little left.

And what alternatives are there for those who don't want to host in public cloud? Hyper-V and VMM is awful and labour-intensive by comparison, Proxmox is still a bit of a newcomer and doesn't do all the fancy VDI stuff, OpenStack requires a some serious talent to set up and maintain.

New audio server Pipewire coming to next version of Ubuntu

Re: Another Sound Server

> Ubuntu 22.10 is a non-LTS release so most users won't see Pipewire until a decision is made to put it into an actual LTS release and that hasn't happened yet...

> This is why there are LTS and non-LTS releases...

Sadly I recall PulseAudio being shoved directly into an LTS release (Hardy?). That said it's caused me very little direct grief in the last decade or so, and its functionality has been very useful for some odd projects I've worked on.

I do recognise there are still plenty of issues with PA, and I've met others who have had audio issues to this day. Fortunately PipeWire has proven a reliable fix for a such issues, so I look forward to it taking PA's place.

Re: Will it finally fix the bluetooth HSP/HFP issue

FWIW my Bluetooth headsets just work in on my Ubuntu laptop. *shrug*

Researchers find 134 flaws in the way Word, PDFs, handle scripts

What's so pointless about PDF though? Is there a better format for distributing documents with a consistent appearance and layout?

Devs of bcachefs try to get filesystem into Linux again

Re: Say what you will about Windows . . .

As a user of Windows and Linux I'd personally rate NTFS as reasonably robust and moderately performant. Nothing more, nothing less.

Dynamic disks are what nightmares are made of when they go wrong (and they do!). LVM by contrast has a bit more of a learning curve but is generally more robust and flexible.

Internet connection now required for Windows 11 Pro Insider setup

Re: Nope

And they say that desktop Linux is complicated!

Huh, it's as if something happened that made people not like CentOS so much

Re: Not exactly a surprise.

Care to elaborate? That's a pretty big deal and inquiring minds would like to know...

Report: Microsoft is thinking about splashing $10bn on Discord to slot it next to Skype, Mixer...

Re: Embrace. Extend, ...

Anticipating the "extend" stage is a bit optimistic in this particular case.

Huge if true: If you show people articles saying that Firefox is faster than Chrome, they'll believe it

> ...especially now that Chromium Edge has replaced the legacy version on Windows 10.

And practically forced itself as the default browser in the process. Apple has been popping up Safari nags for Firefox users for at least a year now, and recently to Edge as well. Less invasive, but still a PITA.

Operating system vendors are scumbags.

Tiny Kobalos malware seen backdooring SSH tools, menacing supercomputers, an ISP, and more – ESET

Re: The Fail

Linux user here. All of you above are correct, except that some of us never claimed Linux was immune. :)

Be careful everyone, and patch your systems no matter what you run. See you at the pub some time!

Ubiquiti iniquity: Wi-Fi box slinger warns hackers may have peeked at customers' personal information

It works fine without a cloud account - I set it up at home for the first time (I'd deployed it to other environments years ago) and was able to run it entirely cloud free.

For the really paranoid block trace.svc.ui.com outbound; there doesn't currently appear to be any other phone home happening except for firmware update checks.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Re: Upstart

Concur - Upstart was great; some welcome improvements vs SysVinit without losing sight of what it was supposed to be doing.

Re: Who cares about Linux?

Nice try, must troll harder.

FWIW there's very likely more kit out there running Linux than any other platform. Those who opt to ignore it lead a pretty sheltered life in this industry.

Oh, the humanity! Microsoft congratulates itself for Teams inflicted on 115m daily users

Re: The end is nigh

"Teams has won the race anyway. "

In the enterprise space yes, through brute force (O365 bundling) rather than merit alone.

In consumer space Zoom has the big mindshare, to the point Zoom has almost entirely replaced Skype as a coinage for video conferencing. Nobody says "hey let's Teams with the grandparents this evening".

OpenStack's 10th birthday is next week, but you get the present of a new release today

For all those involved ->

Here's to another ten years!

Open Invention Network adds Microsoft's exFAT to Linux System Definition, Satan spotted throwing snowballs

Re: Does anyone here use exFAT?

Couldn't agree more - it's a pity the userland tools of many popular OSes neglect to support it well, so it takes a little bit of care (but is perfectly possible) to format a UDF disk in a way that works painlessly on every major platform. I can only guess Microsoft was too busy shoving ExFAT down everyone's throat via various standards forums (e.g. SD cards) to milk those sweet royalties, while UDF would have subverted that effort.

On the flip side it's nice to see that MS turned a corner on that particular issue, so if ExFAT does in fact see proper wide adoption without patent encumbrance then it's only going to be a win for everyone.

Microsoft lends Windows on Arm a hand with emulation layer to finally run 64-bit x86 apps at last

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

I'm a routine Mac and Ubuntu user and every time I spin up a Windows 10 machine (last one was just yesterday) I'm still shocked at how inconsistent the UI remains.

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

Re: And this ladies and gentlemen...

Such a format change applied so recently is all the more reason for the plebs to be genuinely mistaken when entering their rego.

Paragon 'optimistic' that its NTFS driver will be accepted into the Linux Kernel

Re: Whatever for?

> ...to show what professional implementation of File System looks like...

Eh? Much of the existing filesystem support in Linux was also professionally developed. As a recent example Samsung contributed the ExFAT module and user space tools.

> The difference between current Linux kernel exFAT implementation and Paragon’s proprietary exFAT must be the same as the difference between NTFS-3G and what Paragon’s NTFS3.

That's an interesting assumption to make with little to no evidence to back it up.

Re: Whatever for?

> When Windows, Mac, and Linux systems can all universally boot/read/write USB thumb drives formatted with NTFS, life will be that much easier for everyone.

That has worked for years already with UDF and recently ExFAT. NTFS support would be useful, sure, but adds little value for the situation described.

Re: Whatever for?

I can understand the interest in NTFS for working on Windows disks and images, but for booting an ISO why not just use FAT? It's not like a large amount of space is needed. Alternatively ExFAT is now in the mainline kernel that's already in far better shape than what Paragon has tossed over the fence.

Firefox maker Mozilla axes a quarter of its workforce, blames coronavirus, vows to 'develop new revenue streams'

Re: This is actually a good thing

Thunderbird is slow? It does have plenty of faults but speed isn't one of them, and I use it pretty regularly with very large mailboxes.

Class move, Java. Coding language slips to third place behind Python in latest popularity contest

Re: CSS?

CSS3 is apparently Turing complete, so one could technically class it as a programming language.

Just what you want when stuck working from home: Microsoft domain mixup downs Remote Web Access

Eggs, basket, etc.

OpenJDK lands on Windows 10 for Arm: Not 100% there yet but enough to start tinkering

Re: Is Java still a thing?

Yes, unless you live under a rock. Don't see many desktop apps these days but it's huge in server land.

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

Re: Keyword here is "maintained"

> Mac users can be split into 2 groups.

I know many Mac users, but the majority of them don't fit into either of the groups you list.