Posts by JohnFen

Microsoft commits: We're buying GitHub for $7.5 beeeeeeellion

Re: Alternatives?

"I dont see much changing"

A lot has to change -- Github isn't worth anything close to 7.5 billion dollars, and Microsoft certainly wants their investment back somehow, which means there have to be some rather large changes.

Re: @Harley

It's a little sad when you have to reach to something as trivial and relatively unimportant as Minecraft in order to find an example of something that Microsoft didn't fuck up.

Re: RIP Github

"Didn't the new owners stop doing that?"

Don't know, don't care. There's a line that, once crossed, means that I will never again do business with that organization, period.

Re: Hmm...

"If someone didn't have a Linked in profile we could verify them from we wouldn't usually consider making an offer."

Excellent! I wouldn't want to work for a company that showed such a degree of poor judgement, so that helps me to dodge a potential bullet.

Re: Hmm...

"Complete shit, but necessary"

There is literally nothing "necessary" about LinkedIn.

Re: Shite

"They'll integrate it with Linkdin, Skype, Azure and MS developer tools."

This is what I expect, and is why I'm done with Github.

Re: Shite

"At least it wasn't Google."

I don't see how Google would have been any worse. Certainly not better, of course.

Re: Shite

" they have given an undertaking that GitHub will remain autonomous like LinkedIn is "

And yet, understanding or not, Microsoft did destroy what made LinkedIn useful.

Re: Shite

True. And I might wake up to find myself a billionaire tomorrow.

Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

"Why would anyone pay non-trivial sums for something they could set up and run themselves? Is it sheer laziness?"

Usually, it's because those people have better and/or more profitable things to do with their time.

Re: Alternatives?

"VS is not only great"

I suppose this is something reasonable people can disagree about. I don't consider VS to be "great".

Re: Nokia Redoux??

Don't know about Bungie and Yammer, as I've not heard of them, but Skype and LinkedIn aren't doing just fine. They were both utterly ruined and are no longer fit for purpose. I call that a "tragic end".

Migrating today

Goodbye, Github! It was nice while it lasted.

Is Microsoft about to git-merge with GitHub? Rumors suggest: Yes

Re: Better Get Deleting, Its Official Now:

Seems like a speculative article, although I wouldn't be surprised if it's true. I'm ready to delete my Github repos. It's just a click away!

Re: And Google is just as bad

"Microsoft is now much more pro-OSS than Google is"

You'll have to explain this, I'm afraid, as it's not obvious.

Not that I'm defending Google -- Microsoft and Google are both powerfully terrible.

Re: poll choices poor

"I would rather see redhat or Canonical pick up github."

Canonical, maybe. Red Hat wouldn't really be an improvement over Microsoft.

Re: It could have some benefits...

"why are people voting that Google should buy GitHub the poll?"

Probably because all of the options in that poll are terrible, so people are just picking randomly.

Re: Employment terms

Your code can be "closed source" while at the same time you distribute the source code publicly. "Open" and "closed" source is not talking about whether or not the source code is publicly posted, it's about what you are licensed to do with that code.

Re: Everyone simply leaves

I'm so happy I never started using OAuth or other such services.

Re: Disney probably is more of an IT company than AOL

Disney would be awful, but would they be worse than Microsoft? It seems like six of one, half dozen of the other to me.

Re: the survey only listed Disney as a viable acquirer. How about AOL?

I'm not sure which would be less pleasant -- Github being owned by Microsoft or by Red Hat.

If Microsoft buys Github

I'd have to stop using Github.

'Tesco probably knows more about me than GCHQ': Infosec boffins on surveillance capitalism

Re: The Real Threat is State Seizure of Corporate Surveillance Data

"But the point has been made several times that the dot-coms don't have the power nor the ulterior motives of governments in this regard."

It has, but I find that point to be entirely unpersuasive.

Re: They does

"My guess is that Tesco and the others have a lot of semi-accurate and some completely inaccurate information about people."

Tesco probably does what most other slurpy companies do: they combine the data they directly connect with data from other commercial sources such as credit reporting agencies, etc. This is what Big Data is all about. You shouldn't think that what a company learns directly from you is the only stuff the company knows. It isn't.

Re: "not being able to volunteer a social media profile can make someone the subject of suspicion"

" It looks "the Circle" could actually be a prophetic book of Doom...."

The Circle is Zuckerberg's wet dream and the ultimate goal of Facebook.

"There are two big classes of not-quite-users I can think of"

You missed two -- one is people who have friends or relatives that have FB accounts and mention you or post pictures including you. The other is anyone who uses the web and does not block Facebook's trackers.

Re: Tesco Does Not Know More About Me

It may be (and probably is) different in Europe, but in the US in the vast majority of cases, if a company knows something about you, so does the government.

Smart bulbs turn dumb: Lights out for Philips as Hue API goes dark

Re: Naturally

By "third party" I mean an entity outside of yourself and the device in question. Philips counts.

"Why they never realize that they can make off with your very expensive Hue lights instead is beyond me."

I'm guessing that Hue lights have very little resale value.

Re: Fixtures?

So do light bulbs. If your house burns down and the insurance people discover that you've been using light bulbs that lacked adequate certifications, guess who won't be getting an insurance payout?

Naturally

If you're relying on third party services for something to work, you need to expect that it will randomly fail to work. Oh, and it'll be hacked.

This is the thing that makes the current view of IoT unbelievably stupid -- their reliance on third party services. It's not technically necessary, and give little benefit to the end user. It's only required to allow companies to engage in ever-more data mining.

Law forcing Feds to get warrants for email slurping is sneaked into US military budget

Re: It makes no sense -- stored for over 180 days???

"And, I thought there were laws about dumpster-diving thieves."

There are, but -- at least in my part of the US -- they aren't what you may think.

The law says that if you put your trash out on the street for collection, you have abandoned it and taking it isn't theft. Taking the can the trash is in is, though. Ironically, the reason that's the law is because the police made that argument to support their ability to dig through your trash without a warrant, and the courts agreed with the argument.

If your trash or dumpster is on private property, then it's theft (as well as trespassing).

Re: Much as I approve ...

Yes, this sort of thing has a long, long history. That makes it no less of a corrupt practice, though.

I am 100% in favor of the ends, but I am opposed to the means to the same degree.

Facebook finally fully embraces GDPR – Generally Derailing Pages Recklessly

Re: If you think Faecebook is important

This. It's also trivial and cheap-to-free to set up and maintain a website. You don't even really need to know anything about websites anymore, unless you want to get fancy.

Such businesses can have both. If the only net presence a business has is a Facebook page, then that business is completely invisible to me online.

Internet engineers tear into United Nations' plan to move us all to IPv6

Re: how IPv6 address and parameter configuration follows the KISS principle?

"NAT is not a firewall, not even a poor substitute for one."

True -- NAT does something entirely different. However, it is still useful, and should I even move my LAN to IPv6, I'll still be using a NAT to present a single point of presence to the internet.

Re: Mapping plan

It's also possible that he doesn't want stateless autoconfiguration and so isn't using radvd. Many people prefer stateful, or even manual, router configurations.

Re: Mapping plan

"The way to encourage ipv6 adoption is to make it a desirable feature that users demand from their ISPs"

What you're recommending here is a bit like extortion. The plain fact is that for 99% of end end users, IPv4 vs IPv6 doesn't matter. This is an issue that matters to ISPs and other industrial routers.

I disagree with the notion that it is OK to artificially degrade the end user experience just so that users will get mad at their ISPs.

Foolish foodies duped into thinking Greggs salads are posh nosh

Scots have that right, then. There is nothing that can't be made tastier by deep frying it.

Pretentious people prefer proper presentation

That's how it works -- whether it's food, wine, music, or whatever, once you hit a certain level of snobbishness, it's not about whether or not a particular instance of the thing is good, it's about what image it projects and what being seen with that image "says" about you. It's about being part of a club.

OnePlus 6: Perfect porridge? One has to make a smartphone that's juuuust right

Re: So what about the updates?

"I've given up worrying about Android updates"

I consider one of the advantages of using a custom ROM is that you get to avoid automatic updates without trying. The past few years have taught me that I strongly want to avoid having anything automatically update, ever. Updating is something that is better done intentionally, on my schedule, and when I deem it necessary.

Re: Missing from review

Then, as I said, using a custom ROM doesn't fit into your use case, so don't.

"They're not mutually exclusive."

This is absolutely true. My daughter, for instance, has a Galaxy phone that both has a headphone jack and is waterproof. But "because waterproofing" is one of the lies that phone manufacturers keep trotting out to excuse the jack removal.

"You never know when you might need a phone to call the emergency services and you don't get to choose the weather at the time"

True, but my phone isn't waterproof, and I've used it without a problem in torrential downpours anyway. I've even dropped it in a basin of water and, once it dried out, it worked perfectly fine.

Re: "with 64GB and no slot I'm not sure why you'd want to"

"Phones didn't typically have SD back then either"

Huh? Every smartphone I've owned has had SD card slots. Even the feature phone I owned before my first smartphone had an SD card slot. For my use case, they are not optional, even now.

For me, streaming does not replace the need for SD cards.

Re: Missing from review

Then you shouldn't use a custom ROM. But lots of people do use custom ROMs. Personally, I've never actually had an app refuse to run because my phone has a custom ROM and is rooted, but if one did, I just wouldn't use that app.

Re: Missing from review

"Don't think installing a custom OS onto a phone is really a valid item in a phone review, as a review is more than just the hardware, it's the software as well."

I think it's a totally valid thing to comment on in a review. Doing so doesn't mean you can't also review the software that comes with the phone, but a lot of us aren't remotely interested in the software that comes with the phone -- we just want to know if we can install our own ROM.

And I value a user-replaceable battery highly enough that I won't buy a phone that lacks one.

Storm in a teapot: Anger brews over npm's jokey proxy error messages

Why does Mr. Nottingham hate humor so very much? I'm glad I don't live in his world.

US judge won't budge over Facebook's last-minute bid to 'derail' facial biometrics trial

Re: Ironic

"Its truly a shame that directors of companies that employ these tactics cant be given jail time."

Or, at the very least, that the government remembers that corporations are special charters granted by the government at its pleasure -- and those charters can be revoked. This is the "corporate death penalty", and it used to be used to help keep corporations in check. It should be again.

Lessons learned from Microsoft's ghosts of antitrust past: Step up, Facebook

Re: They can't blame any of this on the antitrust

I think your analysis here is strong, but I wanted to expand on this a bit:

"Their failure in search was not to have recognized it was important back when they were launching Windows 95, years before the antitrust case. "

The failure is even deeper than that. When Win 95 was first released, it didn't even install a TCP/IP stack or browser by default. Microsoft wasn't thinking that the internet itself was going to be important, let alone search.