Posts by Mr D Spenser 57 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jul 2014
Last August I purchased a NUC style mini pc with a Ryzen 9 processor, 1 tb of storage, and 32 Gb of DDR5 ram for $399. The equivalent machine now costs $640. Looking on Amazon, the memory alone is close to what I paid for the entire machine. Also, many of the newer models are listed with 24 Gb instead of 32.
I guess if it dies I can recover my cost by just selling the memory sticks.
"We're no longer able to sustain the development and support of the cloud infrastructure that powers this older generation of products."
I'm sorry, but in this day and age where everything is virtualised, why can't you leave the infrastructure running in its own cloud instance? Corporations do it all the time with legacy systems.
"strongly suspect VMware will not surge another decade, or even another 5 years. Especially as Broadcom does not seem to invest much in VMware R&D"
Lack of R&D investment is usually the downfall of any successful company that is taken over. Innovation makes a company successful and continued innovation is required to remain successful. VMWare will need to show how it is evolving to support AI related workloads and infrastructure in order to stay relevant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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/)
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.
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.
I think we have seen this movie before.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/25/foxconn_wisconsin_factory/
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.
"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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
