Posts by Maventi

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.

Microsoft emits a colourful Windows Terminal preview

Re: it ain't json

> There was nothing wrong with XML.

It is a fiddly format to use as a human though.

I'd prefer to see good old tidy INI, or alternatively YAML if more complex data structures are required in a config file for some reason.

Are you having a hard time following what Microsoft is trying to do with .NET 5.0? You're not the only one

Re: kill the beast...

Agreed, that happens much too often. In a similar vein I've lost count of the number of times I've had apps install a JDK instead of JRE as well.

MacOS on Arm talk intensifies: Just weeks from now, Apple to serve up quarantini with Kalamata golive, reportedly

Re: reality of corporate IT

> In corporate environment Windows devices are far simpler to manage, maintain, Control and secure.

Then you get home and your Mac just works for years and years, while Windows requires extensive hand-holding to keep humming. Before you ask, yes I use both on a daily basis.

> As for Chrome I can't think of a more insecure (it sends all your data to a someone else, surely that is the definition of insecure) browser that eats all the resources on your computer.

Edge slurps more than Chrome does. FWIW I'm not a fan of Chrome either.

Repair store faces hefty legal bill after losing David and Goliath fight with Apple over replacement iPhone screens

Short-term, maybe. Long-term, no. I volunteer for charity work on a routine basis and we all use our own computers at the office. All the other volunteers use relatively new Windows 10 laptops and still ask me to do all the printing to the office printers as theirs never work properly while the Mac just works without effort.

Since I bought the MacBook (my first) eight years ago all of the other staff have been through at least two (many three) brand new laptops due to parts breaking and general slow downs, while mine still looks and runs like brand new. They are all tempted by my MacBooks reputation in this org but still balk at purchase cost, despite admitting they've spent a higher combined total on their laptops over the same period as I have. I'll probably sell this laptop soon and still get a reasonable amount for it.

Sure it's possible to get long life from PC hardware if you pay up front for it and carefully manage the OS throughout its lifetime, but then you still have a largely worthless machine after five years in terms of resale, even if it still works fine.

Visual Studio Code finally arrives on ARM64 Windows. No, you haven't woken up in 2017, sadly. It's still 2020

Re: If Node.js is supposed to make "cross platform" easier via JavaScript...

Hasn't Chromium been running ARM64 for years though?

Everything OK with Microsoft? Windows giant admits it was 'on the wrong side of history' with regard to open source

Re: History repeats; full of examples...

> If you don't like their product, don't buy it. Simples.

Not that simple - in many cases it's forced upon us by senior management, regardless of whether it's the best tool for a given job.

Re: Exterminate! Exterminate!

> Nobody was force to use IE.

Yes they were - for a while it was only only browser that worked for a good portion of the web, as websites prioritised supporting IE over web standards.

> The complaint was from companies who wanted to sell copies of their own browsers.

Somewhat; the other big issue with the web's dependence on IE was that is in turn created a dependence on Windows, as nothing else could run IE. So effectively the web was in danger of becoming locked to a single vertically-integrated platform stack. Fortunately the world has managed to move on, however Microsoft still pull the same tricks with vertical integration - for example two decades later many of their web services still only work properly in a single browser.

The big difference between not and then is that they've just finally figured out how to incorporate open source into their business model.

We maintained or increased IT spending, say seven-in-ten pros, execs polled mid-crisis. PS: We love Microsoft most

Re: Got my popcorn . . .

There is no shortage of reasons to hate Microsoft, along with Amazon, Apple, Google and all the rest.

Anyone who thinks a sole vendor has all the answers or their best interests at heart needs to get outside of their tech bubble and see what else is out there.

The point of containers is they aren't VMs, yet Microsoft licenses SQL Server in containers as if they were VMs

Apart from the licensing craziness in TFA, this is the other reason I don't get why anyone would run SQL Server containers in Windows. My understanding is that the container runs SQL Server for Linux, which is a Windows app running on shims to translate Linux API calls (pretty much the inverse of WSL v1), then that in turn gets executed within a Linux kernel running in a VM on Windows, which in most cases is probably also virtualised on another hypervisor layer in the datacenter. That goes against the entire premise of running containers for efficiency.

Re: Licencing is easy

> Open Source, you dont have to licence it, but if if it breaks you will want support and you may have to pay based on every physical core evrywhere in your estate, just in case.

Or you simply pay for support for the dev environment, reproduce the issue, apply the fix, test, then apply the same fix to production. A lot of folks run a mix of RHEL and CentOS following this same model. Much more cost effective than paying for absolutely everything, and avoids the continual wasted time of accounting for it all.

Open-source bug bonanza: Vulnerabilities up almost 50 per cent thanks to people actually looking for them

Re: A Warning From History

To be fair the mantra has never been that open source means fewer bugs, it is that bugs are shallower. That is, if a bug is discovered then the ability to have so many eyes cast over it means that a fix will quickly become obvious to someone. See Linus's law.

WSUSper it with us, Insiders: Windows 10 2004 is getting closer

Re: Can't wait for 20.04

I think you've just broken the Inte]*&s^%!,NO CARRIER

Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it

Re: Try Lightshot

Flameshot is pretty much a clone and works really well. https://flameshot.js.org/

Virtualization juggernaut VMware hits the CPU turbo button for licensing costs

Re: vSphere vs Hyper-V

I've heard this reported both ways from MS resellers for SQL Server. Windows Server certainly needs to be licensed per physical core though. Then don't get me started on CALs. It makes rocket science look easy.

Free Software Foundation suggests Microsoft 'upcycles' Windows 7... as open source

Re: " as Linux is very well entrenched there"

> Once again, just because you don't have to pay licenses for it.

Wrong. I know of nobody who uses Linux because it is free, except in business where using it at scale on servers saves a fortune over proprietary offerings.

Remember that desktop Windows for home use is free also.

All Linux desktop users I know of prefer it over Windows, myself included. And the few of us who need the odd commercial app not supported in Linux paid for a Mac and are happy with that too. And I speak as a previously devout Windows fan from 3.1 through to Vista.

Different strokes for different folks; deriding others over their own choice of OS is silly, especially when combined with arguments that don't hold water.

> Think about all those Active Directories goodies for free - something Linux still sorely lacking for whatever is not a public web server....

IPA for Linux just works and is a very fine solution. There's no direct equivalent of GPO though, but plenty of exceptionally capable CM tools out there as alternatives.

Whoooooa, this node is on fire! Forget Ceph, try the forgotten OpenStack storage release 'Crispy'

Two days on and still no Cinder jokes? Missed opportunity you folks (and El Reg)!

Open-source Windows Terminal does the splits: There ain't no party like a multi-pane party

Hey! Many of us millennials grew up playing on Apple IIs, Commodore 64 and others. I also have fond memories of the Amiga and Atari ST.

What is this, 1989? Laplink is still a thing and wants to help with Windows 7 migrations

Re: Old and busted to new and shiny?

On the plus side they are fast to install and very rarely break things.

Google lashes out at DoJ, Oracle as it asks US Supremes to sniff Java suit one last time

Software patents are unnecessary. Copyrights prevent software from being copied, unless the original author permits it. If you write software and don't want someone to copy it, that system already works. If someone figures out another way to implement the same thing with their own unique code, that's perfectly fine too, as it should be.

Functional devices can't be copyrighted, so we have patents instead - if you publicly document the workings (implementation) of a widget via a patent, in exchange you get a temporary legal monopoly for producing it. If someone comes up with a different method for doing the same thing they quite likely won't infringe the patent. If you don't patent it then anyone is free to copy or adapt the implementation.

Software patents on the other hand often prevent others from implementing something even if they don't have access to the inner workings (source code) and come up with their own unique implementation. This concept is absurd and is why patents don't translate well to software. Perhaps if software patents made working example source code a mandatory part of submission then they would better reflect their traditional counterparts, so that others would be able to invent their own non-infringing implementations.

Kiss my ASCII, Microsoft – we've got one million fewer daily active users than you, boasts Slack

Also check out https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/ms-teams/

Not a fan of Teams myself, but an interesting sign of things to come?

That was some of the best flying I've seen to date, right up to the part where you got hacked

Nosedive?

Devs getting stuck into Windows 10X on Surface Neo will have to tussle with UWP

Re: "avoiding registry bloat"

Many native Windows apps do that too.

How to break out of a hypervisor: Abuse Qemu-KVM on-Linux pre-5.3 – or VMware with an AMD driver

Re: This bug is going to be around for a while

True regarding running bleeding edge kernels, but the big distros will have this backported to their older kernel images pretty quickly so that will be most users covered.

Open-source companies gather to gripe: Cloud giants sell our code as a service – and we get the square root of nothing

Re: SHOCK HORROR

To be fair this is where the GPL (and particularly the AGPL) start to stand out from the rest to some degree. Those using permissive licenses such as MIT, BSD, etc. are even worse off.

Microsoft's only gone and published the exFAT spec, now supports popping it in the Linux kernel

You nailed it. This move is great PR plus it means exFAT support will become standard issue in Android, further cementing it as a standard.

Android vendors mostly don't bother at the moment as it's currently an extra cost that eats into already thin margins. The completely proprietary implementations (e.g. cameras) still need to pay.

It's also low risk; at this point MS have well passed recovering any R&D costs involved in developing the format, and with cloud services bringing in the real revenue it's not really a big deal if the proportionately small income stream from exFAT starts to dry up a bit.

This is only a good thing. Although overdue, better late than never. I really never thought I'd see it this soon.

It's clever too; my understanding of this is that it's only open source implementations that are protected from patents. It's likely that proprietary implementations (e.g. in cameras) still need to pay fees, so if anything this move may help push exFAT adoption and in turn wring more money out of those implementing exFAT but not wishing to join the open source bandwagon. Just a theory.

El Reg sits down to code with .NET for Linux and MySQL, hitting some bumps along the way

Re: nice but is it worth it?

It's because Microsoft understands that 'aaS' offerings are where its bread is buttered now. Linux dominates servers, so much better to properly support that and make buckets of money by hosting it and providing good tools for devs than ignoring it and missing a huge slice of cloud market. Azure would be less than half the size it is now if Microsoft chose to ignore Linux.

Microsoft middlemen rebel against removal of free software licences

Re: Still miss my TechNet...

> We mostly all started where you are now.

Indeed we did. Ex Microsoft fanboy here too. Everyone has their breaking point.

Imagine an Upside Down world where a vastly inferior OS went on to dominate... Stranger Things have happened

> Microsoft's market capitalization is at 1.03 trillion US dollars and they are the most valuable company in the world.

And how exactly does that benefit the average end user?

FWIW the same goes for Apple, Google, et al with their respective platforms.