* Posts by ultimate_noobie

16 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2014

Two words, Mozilla: SPEED! NOW! Quit fiddling and get serious

ultimate_noobie

Just my POV

I started with Opera and switch to FF way back when. About 3 years ago, it just got to the point where loading anything was a trial of patience, followed by wondering what else had been hosed during the latest update. Frankly, same reasons I stopped using Windows and Gnome at home: The changes made no sense and seemed to make things worse. I use Chrome since it "just works" for everything I need. Adding in ublock origins, blocksite and disable HTML autoplay and every site "just works" without bogging things down. I do give the odd version of FF a try to see if it's back up to par but it's still slow and loading my 'needed' extensions makes every page render a crawl. And that's on top of any other cruft. If FF and Thunderbird had just kept the focus on standards compliance, sleek internals and leaving the rest to plugins, I know I'd never have jumped ship.

systemd free Linux distro Devuan releases second beta

ultimate_noobie

> ...freezes...

If you haven't already, try disabling power management (apm). I have two laptops and a desktop that would randomly get stuck at the oddest times. Logs failed to show any reasons for the lockup but the minute I disabled power management, the computers ran without issue--this laptop's last reboot was due to "cat+keyboard" if it helps. Laptop will lose any battery status information and you can set the kernel to boot that way to persist the changes (google will yield the steps). On at least Ubuntu/derivatives, this one (typically) has nothing to do with systemd at all (MMV).

Arch Linux: In a world of polish, DIY never felt so good

ultimate_noobie

If the article is going to tout for the DIY, where's the Slackware love? :)

'I urge everyone to fight back' – woman wins $10k from Microsoft over Windows 10 misery

ultimate_noobie

Before you go all "I'm tech savvy ergo awesome," please source your data a little more. A quick google shows that she did pay to have someone do all the required odds and ends for business work, such as backups, app installs and so on, though it may have just been the folks at the Geek Squad desk who likewise, couldn't help restore it. From the perspective of the average non-technical home business owner, she did her due diligence and that still wasn't enough to save the system nor get everything lost within the time frame (including cancelled sales) back. Honestly, I commend her for her note-taking and desire to get everything resolved through proper channels as a decent person before having to resort to any sort of civil action. Admittedly, MS sent a guy from the local store to represent them which did not help them in the action but given their treatment of her, seems par for course of her experience.

ZFS comes to Debian, thanks to licensing workaround

ultimate_noobie

Re: Legality

To just throw one more point in, "derivative work" has jurisdictional boundaries: A UK court might rule it's not, a US one saying yes it is and an NZ one refusing to even hear the case. Not having a court test in any jurisdiction is probably the real crux of things since there doesn't seem to be any hive minds developing between the various (international) courts regarding software licenses.

Peak Cable looms: One in five US homes now mobile-only for internet

ultimate_noobie

Mobile at least gives you a choice

As someone living in the rural US, I can tell you the reason several of my neighbors have gone mobile only: Choice. There is only 1 internet service provider and out here, the speeds are 1/3 the advertised price at the best of times. For the same amount per month, most folks can go with a data only package and so long as they keep streams to SD, pretty much make it through the month without additional charges. If they switch off to providers with a high speed allocation and a low speed unlimited throttle, then they are fine enough to continue watching cat videos and checking emails to their hearts content. Truthfully, if I didn't need at least a semi stable connection to remote into work, I'd probably do something similar given that physical line's quality has not ever been resolved but the price has gone up twice.

Microsoft sues US DoJ for right to squeal when Feds slurp your data

ultimate_noobie

Re: Hat's off

It's called "Positive Press." Between all the security issues and bad press of Windows 8/.1/+ they are looking at in-roads towards a more positive image with the business level consumers who've been their historic bread and butter. If company X gets notified, even once, that they're being snooped on by Big Brother, that's one more service MS will provide over whomever else. If they really mean it, they'll ignore the orders to stay quite on non-targeted requests (true slurps), cover the inevitable lawsuit with pocket change and get the court of Public Favor on their side, all while awaiting the courts decision. I cheer them for doing the right thing and hopefully, they won't cock this up since they are one of the few entities with the reserve of cash and lawyers to get this done.

Bundling ZFS and Linux is impossible says Richard Stallman

ultimate_noobie

Re: Stallman can change the GPS as welll...

Actually, yes it is. By using the GPL'd function, you've accepted that your code must also be GPL per the license terms. LGPL eliminates this potential. Check into the history of "EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL" to see how the linux kernel has been effectively copyrighting it's API long before Oracle started making claims to the same effect. (Yeah that's gonna get downvoted but it's still true.)

ultimate_noobie

Re: Stallman can change the GPS as welll...

Essentially, the CDDL in this case says it's ok to create the combined work, and the GPL has the problem as if any GPL only symbols are used, that would be a "derivative" and require the ZFS code to be then GPL. As long as no GPL only symbols are used or used indirectly through a shim, then even per the GPL that would be a combined work and okay. It's all about how you define "combined work" vs "derivative work" and unfortunately, that requires arguing the breach of contract potentials before a judge.

FBI: Er, no, we won't reveal how we unmask and torpedo Tor pedos

ultimate_noobie

Re: I know that pattern.

I'd also like to add that the other flaw they are attempting to hide is that they [FBI] broke into the computer unlawfully [without warrant] to plant the tracker. The clue to that is in the statement "Knowing how someone unlocked the front door..." means that the FBI had to pull an electronic B&E. Flashing a warrant is a great defense for ones actions, which I suspect they would have done if they had bothered to get one. I'm all for erasing this type of content from the internet, through the use of fire and medieval torture devices for preference, but I'm a person. As an agency, they can get permission to do these things--I'll avoid any argument on whether they should be allowed to--but they do have to maintain transparency and work within their bounds to do it right. Otherwise, they may as well start wearing costumes and start claiming to work only in the name of "Justice" which is just as inadmissible.

Canonical accused of violating GPL with ZFS-in-Ubuntu 16.04 plan

ultimate_noobie

Let Oracle sue

All Canonical has to do is invoke the "larger work" component of CDDL and distribute the zfs.ko source under CDDL. Linux stays GPL, kernel module sources stay CDDL and nobody's license is infringed. At worst, the SFC can claim that Canonical has to provide a public domain/BSD licensed shim as a bridge (which is how others have handled such 'incompatibilities' in the past). As someone who was around the first time the CDDL vs GPL holy war came up, it just sounds like the SFC is still trying to bury one license for it's favorite.

Side note: The whole argument is kinda moot for me since I use FreeBSD which has had ZFS for pretty much ever now. It's just funny to me that something named the "Software Freedom Conservancy" is trying to create arguments to erase a license they don't like. Nothing like watching someone argue about the "right kind" of freedom :)

Compuware promises mainframe DevOps as old programmers croak

ultimate_noobie

A "good" programmer solves problems with the tools available, no matter how much they hate them or the problem. In my job, we've used everything from ancient assembler on processors that existed 30 years before I was born, military one-off languages where the idea of "documentation" was something that had to be delivered in the same binder with the punch cards to debugging whole systems where every function but main was an inline in some C++ 'derived' language for embedded use. The issue from where I sit is that the companies that want a specific skill set often A) never know what actual skills they need beyond the name of a language/compiler/OS and B) aren't willing to pay above an entry level for these 'desperately' needed skills. Most try to outsource or hope someone is willing to take an underbid and run screaming about how the sky is falling when neither works...

Windows 10 pilot rollouts will surge in early 2016, says Gartner

ultimate_noobie

Not where I work

We just finished our Win7 roll-out last year as have most of our clients. Given the sector of work I'm in, it was stick and carrot to get that much. Since a number of secured systems can't be left in the hands of some dude in Redmond to decide whether or not an update should be applied, rolled back or whatever, these top companies aren't _EVER_ going to update to Win10 until MS's enterprise policies account for autonomous secured systems without 50 admins hawking every undisclosed update. Plus side for me is that a number of client companies are seriously considering Redhat Enterprise as the next major update (in 5 or so years)

Most developers have never seen a successful project

ultimate_noobie

I've spent most of the last ten years testing/verifying code and requirements and have to say that comparing physical to software is apples to oranges. The best programs understand what they A) need vs B) what they can do in X time frame and design requirements to which they can afford (usually B). I can pretty much tell you that if I hear the phrases "We reversed the requirements from the code" or "They're deferring the req issue" then it's a fail that didn't bother with A or B and has been coded like crap, to do something that at least 1 dev believed was what was supposed to be done because the others had no idea at all. Those always come in well over budget, probably on time for the last possible deadline due to throwing bodies and hope at the problem, and are counted as successes since the end customer accepted everything without a lawsuit. The best programs with the best chances have had strong requirements--don't misread that as "Great" or "spot-on", they always have at least a problem or ten--and managers who understand that getting a third person to actually just look everything over to ask "does this even make sense?" is actually a need for anything larger than a few hundred lines. So like 5% of everything I've ever worked on so that puts me outside the articles average :)

US military finds F-35 software is a buggy mess

ultimate_noobie

We did try to warn them

I actually work for one of the companies responsible for testing the JSF code. Numerous times did my managers attempt to point out that what was needed was to revisit the code with the developers and a rather large club as their coding efforts tended to result in more buried bugs--think inlining for the sake of inlining and having to test/analyze it as such because of the safety criteria. Good to know they've taken us seriously by skipping us altogether simply to avoid the deployment of the aforementioned club.

Languages don't breed bugs, PEOPLE breed bugs, say boffins

ultimate_noobie

As a more or less professional "verification engineer", I have to totally agree that these are the two big questions one would need to separate and analyze to get any real direction out of the data. Worst yet, you'd need to add a third and fourth to that list: "Does choice of language affect future revision?" and "Does experience as a team affect outcome?", to really get anything meaningful about choice of language for a project, be it open or commercial.

Point of interesting note, the most defect free (both in terms of code errors and requirements) I've seen in the last decade have been written in functional Ada95 and the worst I've seen are in C++98. Even people with little experience tend to be able to at least read Ada, be able to update it with some googling and keep everything consistent for 20 year old code. It _seems_ that anyone with even 2 years with C++ will try to throw everything into templates and start inlining for "efficiency" reasons. And that holds for both individuals and 20+ person teams. (The 'best' I've seen have been prototyped in Python first since that would give them reliable-ish results before 'hard coding' into a language with a compiler and they could just use the python as PDL requirements. Not something I expect to see in open software but there's always hope.)