Posts by Mr D Spenser

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Elementary is part of Enlightenment

Elementary is the high level interface for Enlightenment window manager which is used in a number of commercial IoT products. The IDE upgrade could be targeting that.

Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6%

And who vetted it?

Bitwarden's FOSS halo slips as new SDK requirement locks down freedoms

All good things must come to an end

While I am not a fan of private equity firms attempting to purchase/invest in anything and everything of value on the planet, it does provide the opportunity for good projects to reward the main contributors and for the supporting infrastructure to grow and be stable. As an alternative, may I suggest you recall the growing pains of the Mozilla and Apache foundations and the projects dependent on their fundraising. While remaining true to the ideals of FOSS, it is wholly dependent on large corporate donations. Pick your poison.

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Flashbacks

Amazing the flotsam that arises from reading these articles. In my case, my actual first work PC was an IBM 3270 PC.

You could toggle between three 3270 mainframe sessions and a single DOS session. Wish I had kept the old slipcase manuals.

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Re: How long before systemd ...

does it have a Registry yet?

Beat me to it. That's the answer to a previous posters question about the sudoers file.

Boeing's Starliner finds yet another way to not reach space

The new Spruce Goose?

Can't help but wonder if the inaugural manned flight of Starliner will also be its last. With SpaceX and now Blue Origin showing that reusability is the way of the future, Starliner's 1960's man-in-a-can design doesn't appear to have much life to it.

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

WORN

Write Once and Read Never.

You have to feel a little sad for all that wasted potential in all that information written to tape only never to be read back in.

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

Re: A little of the other side, no doom & gloom

And it is not just the Windows based medical devices that are walled off, pretty much any device used in direct medical care walled off from the non-medical devices. And typically the non-medical devices are also segregated from anything the public is allowed to touch. And it is good to remember that most CVE's are never exploited. The hole might be there, but getting to it with a reliable exploit is usually to much bother when a well worded phishing email will work.

Also, sadly, the IoT devices that are compromised the most are "security" devices. I would put wireless cameras and SOHO router/firewall devices with externally facing web interfaces at the top of the list.

IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

Where is the demand?

Is this for IBM itself or just an attempt to ward off mainframe abandonment by their customer base? My guess is the latter.

While it has been decades since I wrote any JCL, I have always admired the purity of the batch processing world. The sequencing of steps. The need to know all the files a program would use and describe them. Generational datasets. I remember taking a systems analysis class where the instructor said you were never ready to start writing code until you could define the JCL.

Doesn't really apply in today's interactive, constantly updated world.

Watchdog calls for more plugs, less monopoly in EV charging network

I will purchase an electric vehicle - eventually

The comments others have made pretty much sums up my take on electric vehicles. I believe they are the future, but the convenience of charging and paying for charging needs to match current expectations. Until then I might get something to use as a secondary car I can charge at home for short jaunts, but not my primary vehicle.

YouTube workers laid off mid-plea at city hall meeting

Two types of IT contractor

Type One - you have specialized skills that you can leverage for well paying short term gigs

Type Two - you have skills that are valuable, but not valuable enough to hire you on full time

These people apparently did not understand that they belonged to the second group.

Drivers: We'll take that plain dumb car over a flashy data-spilling internet one, thanks

will it work unconnected?

Many of the current crop of vehicles have software that will either cause the vehicle to stop operating or operate in a degraded "safety" mode based on the sensor data it receives. How long until a vehicle refuses to operate unless it has a sat/cell signal? Will some government please pass a regulation that a car can be put into the equivalent of airplane mode of a cell phone and still operate properly.

Broadcom to divest VMware's end-user computing and Carbon Black units

Get your popcorn ready

Between this earnings call and what was said during the all employees meeting, Hock Tan has laid out the road map for the demise of VMware. Nothing he has said bodes well for customers or employees. No doubt we will see some high profile departures of both employees and customers over the next year. Anyone taking odds that Tan is one of them?

Ubuntu Budgie switches its approach to Wayland

Re: Enlightenment

Hi, my name is David and I am a recovering Enlightenment user. I have used it for decades and can't seem to shake it (using Bodhi). I find comfort in the stability that the lack of significant updates brings. I feel a loss when working with other desktops that won't show me the main menu by left clicking anywhere on the desktop background. Not having Quick Launcher hurts. Of course I would never touch EFL, that path leads to madness. If you doubt me, look what happened to poor Thanatermesis with one of the original Enlightenment distros Elive (https://www.elivecd.org/)

LockBit redraws negotiation tactics after affiliates fail to squeeze victims

Good to know

For SecOps managers who have to fight to obtain and keep their funding, having concrete numbers of what it will likely cost if you do nothing can only help in the budget battles.

Now IBM sued for age discrim by its own HR veterans

IBM is not IBM anymore

Like many of the favorite rock bands of the 70's and 80's, IBM is still around but not quite the same thing. Oh there are a few original members around but mainly it is a bunch of new faces making a living off the reputation created by others. And while I sympathize with those let go because they liked their job and wanted to continue, in no way should it have come as a surprise. The IBM of old was built on mainframes, mini-computers, and the original PCs. The IBM of today is a hollowed out shadow of that behemoth trying to avoid being shutdown for the last time.

NASA rockets draining its pockets as officials whisper: 'We can't afford this'

Make rockets, not war

All in all, I prefer that governments create peaceful money pits like rockets and infrastructure boondoggles if they need to pump money into an economy than guns and bullets.

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

Re: Meaningless Product Rename

By ditching the AD moniker for ID they are able to ditch having to replicate in the cloud all the features they currently support on prem. Besides, you won't need to track those physical devices anymore because all your compute devices will be Azure cloud instances.

Foxconn, India's star recruit for semiconductor manufacturing, quits

Sound familiar?

I think we have seen this movie before.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/25/foxconn_wisconsin_factory/

Threads versus Twitter: Shouldn't we be happy the wheels are falling off antisocial social media?

Re: Holy Cow

Agreed.

What if they are lying to you about <insert any topic you like here>? What if they aren't? What are you going to do about it?

99% of the un-wealthy are going to do nothing. You, are likely to do nothing about any given topic. Me, I'm taking the dog for a walk.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Monolithic or Dynamically Linked Applications?

This is an age old argument that will never go away. Haven't looked but I am sure you can find a chart that attempts to show all the pros and cons of each philosophy. The comments so far have done a good job of pointing out the issues and in the end it boils down to personal preference. Start up time, memory usage, disk usage, stability? Plenty of hills to go stand on and defend.

The future of digital healthcare could be a two-metre USB cable

Return of house calls?

Portable ultrasound devices exist that use phones or tablets to display and capture the images. It would be possible to send a trained tech to the patient for diagnostic or follow up imaging rather than making them come in.

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

Forcing everyone but Enterprise users?

So managed systems won't get the forced upgrade.

Will they then be getting security patches beyond June?

And if so, then why the Fsck can't Everyone get the patches!

Logic has never been MS's forte.

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: Ahh...yes, metrics

I fellow I used to work with had the perfect term for metrics and associated dashboards: Management P0rn

Power behind throne to depart as SAP enters a new era

Not Surprising

Just seems to be following the trend. No doubt some consultancy firm convinced this plateaued tech company to get an Indian CEO with not background in the business to come in and milk the current revenue stream for all it is worth.

NSA urges orgs to use memory-safe programming languages

Re: Crap unsafe software can be written in any language...

Full disclosure, I am not a Rust programmer or pretty much any sort of programmer anymore (JAPH).

However, in the documentation it does explain how to get around some of those pesky memory checks and gain "superpowers" when you know you are right and the compiler is wrong.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html

So yes, "Crap unsafe software can be written in any language"

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

One valid insight

"But you won't get any telemetry out of it, no user behavioral data, which is arguably a blessing..."

Other than that I pretty much agree with the prevailing sentiment of most the comments. PDF is good for what it is intended. Too bad f it clashes with your phone centric ephemeral world.

Software fees to make up 10% of John Deere's revenues by 2030

and what could possibly go wrong

Two statements from the article.

...the company now plans to have 1.5 million machines and half a billion acres of land connected to the John Deere Operations Center within a matter of years."

"Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems."

Moving to the now essential corporate subscription model is easy, but do they understand the consequences if they don't do it securely. Do they understand just how much of a state sponsored target they will be?

Here's hoping that they are not relying on a bunch of intern written javascript to protect the world's food supply.

NASA just weeks away from trying again with SLS Moon rocket launch

Meanwhile SpaceX twiddles their digits

SpaceX has been continuously denied the opportunity to test out their moon rocket Starship until SLS has a chance to go first. SLS is a 50 year old boring conventional design. Starship has the opportunity to fail in several new and amazing ways. Get the opening act over with and bring on the real entertainment!

Source: IBM disguised Watson Health layoffs as a 'redeployment initiative'

Death by a thousand cuts

It appears that IBM is no longer a cohesive company, but instead has become some sort of strange "Used IT" marketplace. For the life of me I have looked for something to point to that says "This is what IBM does", but nothing jumps out.

I expect that the future of IBM is to milk the mainframe + software renewal market for as long as it can while chasing the whatever the current fad is (AI, blockchain, quantum computing, etc) in an effort to look like they remain relevant. Along the way various pieces of the company will be sold off to make the quarterly numbers. Unlike the true IBM'ers that lived and breathed Big Blue with the expectation of being there for a 40+ year career, most of the current leadership were brought in from elsewhere. They are at IBM not to build or in this case restore a once great company, but to supervise it's demise.

About that $1b... IBM says Watson Health assets fetched $230m in pre-tax profits

Perhaps the bloom is off the AI rose

I cannot help but wonder what the inability of IBM to make Watson Health profitable or to offload it to an actual healthcare entity represents. Are we seeing a concrete example that AI/ML cannot produce the results the hype machine promised? Can we expect to see more announcements of the shuttering of other various startups and corporate AI efforts in the near future?

Resurrected Dundee Satellite Station to host quantum Optical Ground Station

Re: Science! ...and Bacon!

Gotta love the determination not to lose a valuable resource due to administrative incompetence.

Also love the link to Bacon Sarnie article. Didn't realize how much I missed the late great Lester Haines writing.

Tech hiring freeze doesn't mean people won't leave

Re: A lot in there

"at much lower rates"

However, often times the productivity and quality is also lower leading to the need for more staff to equal the same output thus negating the advantage of the lower rate.

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

The original Internet can still be found in remote corners

Whenever I need a break from the current Web x.x dreck I slip away to sdf.org

A self funded holdover from the ARPAnet days. The Welcome page provides some context.

Microsoft plans to drop SMB1 binaries from Windows 11

Re: Problems ahead for old Sonos units

I have the same issue. For Sonos, the killing off of SMB1 is a godsend. By the magic of doing nothing they shift people away from the non-profitable practice of playing locally stored music to the profitable practice of having to use either a paid service that they get a cut from or their own ad laden streaming service.

Win 11 adds 'requirements not met' nag for unsupported hardware

Windows 11 is proof that ...

Windows 10 is the last version of Windows you will ever need.

Microsoft slides ads into Windows Insiders' File Explorer

Got one in Word today

Opened a word doc at work today and it had two yellow the banners. The first was the common warning about being in protected view and that I had to click to enable editing.

That was expected.

The second told me about the lovely Employee Benefit of getting a 30% discount on Microsoft 365 for my personal use!

Still more expensive than LibreOffice.

Education Software Solutions tells school customers: We are moving to 3-year licensing contracts and so are you

Wanted - Government sponsored Hackathon

In some other universe...

For the good of the people they represent, the Government encourages development of an open source application for use by any school system that wishes to use it to meet the regulatory/compliance mandates created by said Government. The Government supplies the specs and manages the code while people with an interest in spending their tax dollars on actual education instead of overpriced administrative software contribute their time and talent. Let university students earn credit by participating in working through the bug fix/enhancement lists.

As I said, in some other universe.

Google to auto-enroll 150m users, 2m YouTubers with two-factor authentication

Re: 'something you have'

Not sure why this is getting the down votes

I agree with strong passwords and MFA when the information is important enough to protect

Having to login to your "free" account to see sports scores is just stupid.

I have no problems with sites using ads to generate revenue to provide me with information. I do have a problem with sites that have decided to generate their income by participating in commercial surveillance.

What better tracker that an id that has been authenticated. I bet tracking companies will pay a premium for that information.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

Waiting for at least Windows 11.1

I run older kit that is quite capable of running Windows 11 but not shiny enough to be supported. Linux doesn't care so that is what I run on it with Win10 confined to a VM. I would bet that if 6 months from now the Windows 11 adoption rate is in single digits, MS will release Win 11.1 that will magically be more backward compatible (and start forcing upgrades from Win 10.)

Apache foundation ousts TinkerPop project co-founder for tweeting 'offensive humor that borders on hate speech'

Who ratted him out?

Kind of suspicious when "a private Twitter account with 45 followers" gets flagged like this.

I suspect that it is more like someone with too much time on their hands is searching Twitter for hot button words.

I miss the old Internet where nobody knew or cared that you were a dog.

ICANN extracts $20m signing fee for $1bn dot-com price increases – and guess who's going to pay for it?

Its not bribery, its my salary

IOC, FIFA, ICANN when you run with the right crowds they will be happy to get you on a board of directors or some other cushy job that covers your lifestyle.

Android dev complains of 'Orwellian' treatment as account banned after 6 years on Play store

Your app has been replaced by Google Assistant

Now I don't know for sure that that is what is happening, but I wouldn't rule it out.

Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage

and also killed off improving Perl 5

By taking the Perl 6 moniker, whether intentionally or not the team made it nearly impossible to create a major revision to Perl 5. Instead the "original" Perl has been incrementally building out to the current 5.30.0 version. If the Rakudo/Camilia quit refering to themselves as Perl 6 then perhaps a proper successor to Perl 5 will be developed (Perl 7, Perl X?) and I won't have to explicitly declare features that have been around since Perl 5.10 (can you say "say").

'The inmates have taken over the asylum': DNS godfather blasts DNS over HTTPS adoption

Privacy or Commerce?

I refuse to believe the argument that the motivating force for this is privacy. With a RFC to support them, browser makers will use this to funnel DNS requests thru their servers and sell the information thereby hijacking the revenue stream that ISPs currently own. Meanwhile, all of our content gets slower because what used to take 2 UDP packets to achieve will now take at least 8.

Somebody please bring back the original Internet. The current one is a commercial driven dung heap.

Farewell then, Slack: The grown-ups have arrived

Re: What about cisco?

Plus it give you the added benefit that your local Cisco account reps can now directly integrate themselves into your infrastructure! Well, at least they do at our site.

Google AMP supremo whinges at being called out on team's bulls***

Gobsmacked

The other night I booted up an old laptop to help track down an issue on another machine. Google noticed that the date time on my machine was off by a couple of years and politely refused to answer my queries until I reset it to the current day.

Really Google? Have you become so arrogant that forcing me to set my clock a particular way seems OK to you or that you are so clueless that you don't understand why that is bad behavior.

Get whimsical and win a Western Digital Black 6TB hard drive

*sigh* Beam me up Scotty, there is no intelligent life on this planet.

I don't think you're ready for this Jelly: Google pulls support for Android WebView

Haven't you ever heard of planned obsolescence?

From Wikipedia:

"Planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence in industrial design is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will become obsolete, that is, unfashionable or no longer functional after a certain period of time."

Sorta says it all.

Back in the 60's and 70's US cars lasted for 4-5 years max until Honda showed up and forced a change. Hopefully unlocked phones with a standard OS can force this same type of change.

Right now my phone is stuck at 4.2.2 and my iPad 1 is stuck at 5.1.1.

Sonos AXES support for Apple's iOS4 and 5

Marketing Deals Rule!

Sonos has deals to promote various paid services. When those deals expire they need to get the apps updated in order to promote their newest BFF. This is a dark underside to the interconnected eco-system where a company's commitment to their customers gets superseded by other business relationships. How much is it costing them to host a free app? Is it less if it only runs on newer hardware?