Posts by JasonT

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Conflating Utility in Kernel and OS?

I'm not a Kernel developer. I've written C code back in the day to communicate with serial and parallel ports, and I've recently dabbled with Rust on a user-facing application. So my opinion is admittedly poorly informed.

There are things that are awesome about Rust. Pattern-matching enums, and implementations like Option and Result are great. Using serde to handle JSON is awesome, I don't have to "guess" whether something is a string, a number, etc. Unlike C#, I don't have to worry about a library I'm using really does have nulls properly. Very good things all around, excluding ambiguity around async handling (to tokio or not to tokio...) and error handling (why do we even need thiserror, anyhow, etc.?)

But... in a kernel universe where I imagine you are communicating directly with registers, swapping and paging memory, triggering and responding to interrupts (if that's even a thing anymore), it seems like you'd have to be plugging in "unsafe" in enough places that you are short-circuiting a lot of of the safety that Rust is trying to provide.

Rust seems like a very good fit for the OS, stuff can be built and deployed independently, and where you are directly communicating with user space and getting thrown "who knows what?" Rust's micro-management of typing, ownership, etc. seems very well suited to this corner of the universe. Maybe efforts should be focused on leveraging Rust in the OS, and further refining the language before trying to use it in the kernel.

Amazon CEO says AWS staff now spending ‘much of their time’ optimizing customers’ clouds

Re: Chicken, welcome to the roost...

This is an honest take. Does AWS cost more to an SMB than hosting their own kit? Absolutely. But...

1. No SMB I've worked for has been keen on paying for multi data-center redundancy.

2. Scaling back compute resources (standing up a server temporarily or getting rid of a server you don't need anymore) is a lot easier to do in the cloud than for an on-premise server for which you are capitalizing for years.

3. On-premise equipment often is expected well-past its expected life span

A lot of the problem with AWS is that many use it as a VM farm with redundancy and stop there. If you don't learn how to *properly* manage auto-scaling and avail of stuff like serverless technology, you will spend a lot more to do the same thing, albeit with more redundancy and reliability.

Surprise! The metaverse is going to suck for privacy

Re: I think this gives too much credit to metaverse

There was a point early in personal computing when it seemed that the use case was limited to boxes with keyboards. Fast forward to today where, even if you don't own a smartphone or tablet, you will probably run into a doctor's office where instead of paper forms, you'll be given a tablet to fill out. Self-service kiosks at retail and airports run on the same tech. You don't have to run around with a tablet to be using one all the time, and this metaverse stuff isn't any different. And I am lumping in augmented reality in there, because I feel that is where the vast majority of people will interact with this brave new world of data mining. Most people are not going to be running around with avatars in fake universes getting fake laid.

Today, yeah, you have to be running around with goggles or such. Tomorrow, those cameras, metabolic sensors, etc. will be installed near everywhere you go. The monitors won't be on your face, they'll be plastered onto the walls, shelves and racks. Projectors and holograms coming soon. There will be terms of service that you will implicitly agree by entering the establishment, but it's okay because you can review them, if the manager can find them, and you might even understand them if you have your lawyer/barrister with you.

At the gym? Our sensors will make sure that none of our customers are dangerously over-exerting themselves. We can guide you around your circuit. Out shopping? It gets even more obnoxious. Convenience, custom experience and, of course, the promise to anonymize all that data before it goes to third parties; who will have to spend at least some money to reassemble that anonymized data into *your* profile.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 is here

Re: quis procurat ipsos procurates?

What we really need is a new package manager integrated with systemd.

'Automate or die!' Gartner reckons most biz apps will be developed via low-code by the people who use them

No Code = Beinoff B.S.

Almost a decade ago I was at a company that was launching Salesforce as their CRM. They were pushing very heavily "No Code" with corresponding logos - red slashed circle around the word "code" and such. At a sales meeting they brought up this concept, and I asked two questions. #1 - given the number of implementations to a just-short-of-custom Oracle ERP implementation we had to maintain, among others, how many *dedicated* developers should we anticipate to support Salesforce in our organization? It went from Zero to about Five. #2 - to do all the things they they were demonstrating, how much code (macros, workflow definitions) and such was sitting behind what we were seeing. It went from "No Code" to "well, it's not Java..."

Linux Mint sticks by Snap decision – meaning store is still disabled by default in 20.1

Updated to 20.1

So far, so good.... I'm on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th gen. Everything has worked well with Mint, except for two things...

1. Fingerprint reader does not work

2. Bluetooth headset support is garbage; this is not a Mint thing, it's a circular firing squad between PulseAudio, bluez and the Linux kernel. As things stand today, a Bluetooth headset can only be used with HSP/HFP (i.e. audio quality of a POTS phone). This is, by far, the biggest point of friction for Linux on the desktop for my purposes.

Other than that, very satisfied

Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond

Re: Sadly... this is the beginning of the end

I wouldn't be so sure that Microsoft wants to "take over" the Linux kernel. This might just be the commoditization of kernel functionality. Does it make sense for Microsoft to throw money at something for which a superior solution exists that's free? It could pour a fraction of what it spends on the Windows kernel, file systems, etc. into Linux an and even LSF and probably still be considered a generous sponsor. Redmond could then spend its money building up its Azure stack, developer tools, and enterprise stack (Exchange, SQL Sever, etc.) which are more profitable and have more growth potential.

I don't find this any more evil or suspicious than what Amazon does with taking things like Redis, MongoDB and Elasticache, forking them internally to add scalable storage and some management sweeteners, and charge a lot of money for it. If Microsoft really does continue its trend toward contributing to the kernel, supporting its tools on Linux, etc. one could make the argument that they are better open source citizens than Amazon.

Document? Library? A new kind of component? Microsoft had a hard time explaining what its Fluid Framework is

The security dumpster fire of client-side editing of Fluid fragments that refer to each other is going to be something to behold...

What's that, Skippy? A sad-faced Microsoft engineer has arrived with an axe? Skippy?

Visual Studio != Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a very different beast than Visual Studio. The release cadence and overall responsiveness for VS Code issues (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues) is much better than Visual Studio. This is one of the few applications that I look forward to the close-to-monthly releases. If you're not looking at VSCode because "it's M1cr0$haft" you're doing yourself a disservice.

US Congress finally emits all 3,000 Russian 'troll' Facebook ads. Let's take a look at some

Re: I fail to understand

I don't believe the purpose of the trolling was necessarily to get Trump elected, but rather to add to the instability of the American political climate here. Although there have always been efforts to this effect; those efforts (or at least their efficacy) seem to have accelerated during the presidencies of GWB and Obama (with the help of social and viral media). This is why you saw things like prods to African American and LBGTQ communities.

From the Russian troll farms' point of view, a Trump victory would be extra special bonus points, if indeed their objective was instability. A Clinton victory, while not as nice, would still be a fertile environment to continue their trolling efforts (especially if the whole Russian thing never hit the national attention). A majority of "red state" people had a healthy mistrust of Clinton as it was (justified or not), and her presidency would not have salved their paranoia.

The point is to build a network of mistrust, apprehension and paranoia within the populace and against the government. It's kind of a bleak time to be an American right now.

Boffins on alert: Brace yourselves for huge gravitational wave coming within a decade

The Reg Blocking it's own ads?

That screenshot of The Reg does not have the usual cruft of border adds and such (I'm currently seeing IBM). Home page loads horribly until you put in something like Ghostery, disable the 15 trackers on The Reg's home page, and then... yeah, you can see the speed improvements in Quantum.

From slow batches to fast files, how Microsoft is luring folks into Azure

The opportunity is...

...cost. Yes, you can run your own servers in your own data center, with your own SAN and fiber channel and etc. And yes, if hardware capital costs were the biggest cost, putting infrastructure on the cloud would make no sense.

But then comes downtime. Yes, we can buy a SAN array with redundant controllers and redundant power supplies. Will never go down, except for when it does; either because you have to have a maintenance window to update the firmware, or because you didn't and it goes down because that firmware fixes a flaw in the fiber channel controller (not imaginary, I assure you). Does your company go out and buy a redundant SAN array for the SAN array that wasn't supposed to go down? Do you rent another cage at your co-lo to put it in? What about geographic redundancy?

When your capital depreciation is done, do you always go out and upgrade your servers? Do you update your routers and switches? Or do you keep what you have because it's "good enough" and throw more money at developers to try and pare down their SQL statements and bloated apps to keep performance acceptable?

Big enough companies can spend their way through these problems without the help of Amazon or Microsoft. If you are under a billion dollar company though, good luck on convincing your leadership (or the board) that spending the money to have redundancy and performance is worth it. Until stuff goes down, and you get to update your resume. Downtime has a cost too, it just doesn't get consistently measured.

Having worked at companies with on-premise (actually co-lo) and cloud, I will take cloud all the time. Yes, there is the occasional horror story like the AWS S3 failures, but it happens far, far less frequently (especially if you stay out of us-east-1) than the outages when you are the guy taking the 2 am call. And there are far, far more tools to build resiliency and redundancy than a lot of companies are willing to pay for to build in-house.

Security is more work, but there are improvements in at-rest encryption, encrypted VPNs etc. that mitigate a lot of the pain. Engineering is still quite important, I spend less time reading HP and DELL service bulletins and more time working on orchestrating and automating deployments, backups, etc.

One other thing too, it's far cheaper to experiment and decommission resources in the cloud. Want to stand up a large Hadoop cluster, experiment with it, and then shut it down because it didn't work out? Unless you are lucky enough to work at a company with lots of spare capacity racked up, this is much easier to do in the cloud than if you are having to try and explain why you want to take an early write-down on infrastructure that didn't quite work out.

Apache Foundation rebuffs allegation it allowed Equifax attack

Re: And here comes the thunder...

Typo: You are not their "Customer" - you and your personally identifiable data are their product.

Rimini Street: Dispute with Oracle is contract law, not copyright

Re: Once again...

There is no circle of hell deep and dark enough for Oracle to sufficiently punish them for the horror of their turd pile EBusiness Suite.

However, the topic in the article you reference (Oracle trying to copyright APIs), isn't at issue here. It would be if Rimini created their own patches based off of published service bulletins. But that is not what they were doing. They were storing and distributing Oracle-authored documentation, patches, etc.

The company that I was at considered Rimini to see if we could ween ourselves of the fiscal bloodletting of Oracle support. Once Rimini was precluded from distributing Oracle patches in 2014, the best they could promise was to craft patches based upon whatever version of EBS you wound up on when you cut the cord with Oracle. This did not seem to be a very sustainable path, unless one was planning on ditching EBS anyway and just wanted to keep it up and running for a couple of years.

The Linux cloud swap that spells trouble for Microsoft and VMware

Re: Optimizied HyperVisors

"Large installations with bespoke software? There won't be Windows." - but they could be Azure, if a company feels compelled to play in the public cloud. It may be a sign of the apocalypse, and Ackbar would likely think it a trap, but Microsoft seems to be deepening its resolve to be a Linux player. Signs include Intel Clear Linux in Azure, Microsoft's investment in containers, including their Deis tool... If nothing else, Microsoft is hedging its bets

Put down your coffee and admire the sheer amount of data Windows 10 Creators Update will slurp from your PC

Re: I thought

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-pioneer-munich-poised-to-ditch-open-source-and-return-to-windows/

Linux on Windows 10: Will penguin treats in Creators Update be enough to lure you?

Maybe useful with Docker?

Setting asside that Microsoft is the Devil, Windows 10 is spying on me, etc., I have to use a Microsoft machine at work. When I have to do something for Linux, I have been using Virtual Box, which is a bit of a pain. More recently, I've been trying out Docker and that seems to work pretty well. The only inconvenince for me is the poor shell support (Git Bash is not a joy to use and often messes up screen rendering). If I had proper out-of-the-box bash support to use with Docker, that could be a good thing, at least for me...

How Rogue One's Imperial stormtroopers SAVED Star Wars and restored order

Re: on that (lack of) accuracy claim:

Hopefully you are not referring to the Thrawn showing up in Star Wars Rebels, who is basically Mr. Salacia in Metalocalypse, who just basically lets his adversaries do whatever they want ("We wait...") making us wait for a grand evil plan that takes forever to materialize in any significant fashion.

Intel's new chip targets industrial IoT

Title Inverted

By next month, the title will be "Industrial IoT targets Intel's new chip"

Microsoft: Give us better staff

Re: Talking out of both sides

The larger the labor pool, the lower prevailing salary (supply & demand). No need to ask President Trump to allow in developers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H potential terrorists.

The web is DOOM'd: Average page now as big as id's DOS classic

Re: 'You need a plugin to display this content'

Old news... they are already on to Quake 3:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62064441/ioquake3.js/ioquake3.html

Google's 'fair use' mass slurping of books can continue – US Supremes snub writers' pleas

"Go to Google books and you will find there are no ads on the site."

Yet

Microsoft to make Xamarin tools and code free and open source

Re: Oops, an expensive and unfortunate mistake for some

Yah, I remember seeing Xamarin demoed at re:Invent, and for simplistic UI apps, it made a lot of sense. But then the price tag was something like $1,000 USD year per developer per year for businesses, and there was no way I could see justifying that to my fearless leaders. There's no way to make everybody happy with this sort of acquisition, but I hope that they will throw out credits to Azure or free MSDN subscription extensions or something as a consolation prize.

Amazon WorkSpaces two years on: Are we ready for cloud-hosted Windows desktops?

We have a chunk of offshore workforce reviewing and editing large graphic files, which happen to be sitting in the AWS cloud (uploaded there by users). Transmitting large chunks of data to a third-world country data center and maintaining decent quality storage in that data center is painful. Solutions like Zadara and EFS are not cheap.

We are evaluating Workspaces and so far things look promising. Graphics and performance are sufficient for the artwork reviewers to do their job, and the bandwidth consumption is far more manageable than sending huge files across the ocean. For us, at least, this might be worth it.

Cloud will kill tech sales jobs

Re: @Lost all faith... \

This is the viewpoint of a guy who does mostly software development, but the in-house infrastucture was always difficult to scale up where I worked at. It was all capital, so the hoops to jump through were brutal. And, even after equipment was fully depreciated/end-of-life, we had to beg to replace what was perceived as working well enough. The vendors were just awful, and as the years went on, put out increasingly fragile junk. SANs that "would never go down" had firmware that had to be replaced (and we often found out about this after a failure). Blade servers with massive internal redundancy would, invariably, fail (I believe in this case, it was the fibre channel controllers). Most of my experience with hardware has been with Dell/EMC and HP, others' milage will hopefully vary. And we would never, ever staff sufficiently to deal with firmware updates, drive replacement, OS updates, VMWare updates, etc. that were required to keep the stuff running. (and then there was Oracle, but that's another trail of tears...)

Sorry (and I know this will not be a popular view on this site) but I have seen far less outages hosting our stuff in the cloud. Granted, a lot of our problems were self--inflected and governance related. But, our incremental costs are smaller, so the decisions are easier for adding servers and/or increasing their capacity. Is it more expensive? Sure it is, especially since we lose any ability to depreceiate our costs for tax purposes. But we can actually implement things like geographic redundancy without playing "mother may I".

As far as the lost sales job, I would be fine if they all were borded on Ark B along with the hairdressers and hand sanatizers of Golgafrincham. They are paid to lie, they serve no extisential value other than caring for their families. Unfortunately, the disappearing sales jobs will be largely replaced by marketing jobs, who also lie, just to a broader audience (because it's all about scalability).

Bacon as deadly as cigarettes and asbestos

Re: Wouldn't be worth it...

Hours to get a bone fixed up? My experience in the US hasn't been much better than that. With emergency rooms shutting down, they try and steer us more to "Urgent Care" centers, which may win the most Oxymoronic Designation Award.

As far as bacon vs. cigarettes go, I have yet to see anybody have to step out of the office every other to take a drag off a block of bacon. Bacon is not good for us, meat in general is agriculturally a pretty inefficient nutritional source, but that bacon is likely getting consumed with other deep-fried and/or sugary goodies that are just as bad or worse. They are just trying to soften us up for lab-grown meat (http://gizmodo.com/the-future-will-be-full-of-lab-grown-meat-1720874704)

If you got Netflix for Miss Marple, you're out of luck (and a bit odd)

Amazon vs. Google Infighting

I signed up for Amazon Prime with the $79 offer. Having been a Netflix user, there is some stuff on Amazon that I wouldn't mind seeing. First off, no Chromecast support, apparently because Amazon doesn't like the Google Store, and Google will only let your app talk to Chromecast if you distribute it through their store. For security, because the Google Play store is the paragon of security.

Amazon wants me to buy a Nick Nolte Amazon TV Stick or whatever, because you can never have too many HDMI devices hanging off of your AV kit. Not wanting to buy an Amazon TV stick, I tried casting the video from my Droid Turbo, which was horrible quality and skipped a lot (apparently Motorola and Google couldn't be bothered to get last year's flagship phone to work properly with Chromecast, even though they were still a "couple" when it was being designed). My PS3 supports Amazon TV, so I got to the video from there, but only after sifting through two PS3 update screens (it's been a while since I used it), and registering my Amazon account using the game controller (which was loads of fun).

This is not frictionless. It is not not pleasant. It is why Redbox still survives in the US (for pepole who are not technically inclined) and pirating is still popular (for people who are). Until the proprietary squabbling stops between companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Hollywood Studios, et al, the biggest adopters of video streaming will be the pirates. I don't mind paying for content, I just don't want to buy and deploy redundant hardware based upon which content I am trying to watch.

Oracle to certify its database v.12c for Windows 10

32 bit vs 64 bit not about the OS

I have not run the latest Visual Studio on Windows 10 (or anything else). But Visual Studio 2013 was a 32 bit affair. If you wanted to build something using the integrated website debugger, you would need both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of your Oracle assemblies. You can conveniently code and debug a site in Visual Studio, and deploy it in IIS as 64 bit.

The managed versions of the Oracle .NET assemblies (ODP.NET) worked pretty smoothly. Unfortunately, they did not support things like UDTs, which are pretty much mandatory when working against eBusiness Suite (EBS). So, we ended up having to use the unmanaged assemblies, which where basically shims over the runtime client DLL files. Unmanaged assemblies have to match both the version and bit level (32 vs 64) of the runtime DLL files. This got really painful because EBS was very particular about what runtime it would use, and that runtime was usually pretty old and not compatible with new versions of the runtime that TOAD and other developer tools wanted installed. Setting up development environments was a nightmare. Deploying was a nightmare. Oracle needs make the managed ODP.NET libraries feature complete.

Mine's the one with the gun in the pocket, which I will point at my head the next time I have to work with anything associated with EBS and the Oracle runtime libraries.

Sysadmins, patch now: HTTP 'pings of death' are spewing across web to kill Windows servers

Peformance (at least for static pages) is one reason - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUX_web_server

Chrome version 42 will pour your Java coffee down the drain: Plugin blocked by default

Didn't see a post on this, but there is a workaround which gets you through September, when Google will completely kill NPAPI in Chrome.

1. In Chrome, browse to chrome://flags/#enable-npapi

2. Click on “Enable”

3. Close all instances of Chrome and restart

I am disappointed, if not surprised, by Oracle's response ("just use another browser") found at https://java.com/en/download/faq/chrome.xml.

Soz, web devs: Google snatches its Wallet off the table

I'm guessing if they got anywhere near "everyone" using it, they would not be yanking it.