* Posts by egreen99

11 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2015

New CentOS Linux distro sips updates from RHEL codebase like an ever-flowing Stream

egreen99

Fedora is unstable in that you have to take down your site every six months to upgrade to the next supported release, or you lose access to bug fixes and thus your site becomes vulnerable to attack by hackers. Whereas with Centos, you do 'yum update' every so often and only need to reboot if the kernel changed and if the kernel changed in a way that matters to you. (If some obscure function changed that I don't use, obviously I don't need to reboot). I've had Centos systems up and running serving code continually for two years straight, interrupted only by a power outage that took down the host ESXi server. I've never had an outage more than a minute due to an update from one minor version of Centos to the next minor version of Centos. Meanwhile, Fedora requires an outage of close to an hour with each update.

Not to over-hype this storage chip tech, but if I could get away with calling my first-born '3D NAND', I totally would

egreen99

The future is finally arriving, I guess

Many people roundly mocked the late Jerry Pournelle when, in the late 1980's, he proclaimed that in the future semiconductor storage would supplant rotating rust. Seems though that he may have been right. 3D NAND looks like it'll meet or beat spinning rust on capacity, and if the price goes down, spinning rust is likely dust.

There once was a biz called Bitbucket, that told Mercurial to suck it. Now devs are dejected, their code soon ejected

egreen99

Re: That's just it

Linus wrote git because the Mercurial of the day, which was written in pure Python, was too slow and BItkeeper, the product he wanted to use, had a jerk founder/owner who changed the licensing terms mid-stream. That's pretty much it. He also took the opportunity to make git work for exactly his workflow, which it does. Of course, Linus's workflow isn't like most workflows so git sort of forces you to work in one specific way that Linus likes rather than in a way that is natural for most people, but so it goes. People used it anyhow because Linus is cool, so here we are.

egreen99

Why would we go with #3?

We've been hosting Mercurial repositories with Bitbucket since 2010. We went with Mercurial because its feature set best fit the previous commercial product we were using, making it easy for me to export the repositories from the previous product and importing them into Mercurial without losing the change history. Git's feature set simply doesn't match what we got with Mercurial.

That said, Bitbucket was the last major Mercurial hosting company out there, so either we self-host or we move to Git. So we'll likely move to Git. But at that point, why bother with Bitbucket? They're the #3 hosting company for repositories, behind Github and Gitlab. So we'll discontinue our commercial account with Atlassian for Bitbucket, and instead open one at Github. Because why would we go with #3 when #1 is out there?

Iranian-backed hackers ransacked Citrix, swiped 6TB+ of emails, docs, secrets, claims cyber-biz

egreen99

Not surprising to me

Security people are often coming across hoards of data from other firms on the dark web while tracking down their own client's lost data. They then report the intrusion to the FBI and to the company that this data comes from -- companies like Resecurity have friendly contacts within the FBI and in many corporate security departments for exactly that purpose. It's a fairly insular business where most of the major players know each other, share latte's and/or beers with each other on a regular basis at various conferences, etc., and most of the major players both in the independent consultancies and in the major corporations know each other.

At last, someone's taking Apple to task for, uh, not turning on iPhone FM radio chips

egreen99

Re: People who live in hurricane prone areas

Regarding FM transmitters and battery/generator power: when I did some contract work for an FM station some time ago, we were required to have a week of diesel fuel for our generators (a generator capable of operating our transmitter and a generator capable of operating our studio and our microwave link to our transmitter site which was located some miles away) because we were part of the Emergency Broadcast System which was supposed to activate in the event of nuclear war or, well, a hurricane.

egreen99

As others have pointed out, you need an external antenna of a meter or so in length to get decent reception. I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 with a Qualcomm modem chip that has the FM receiver hooked up to the headphone jack, but if I don't plug in my headphone cable, I don't pick up any signal. With it, I seem to pick up the same stations as in my auto.

Given that Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 and up, clearly it's not possible to enable the FM receiver in any of their new phones. There just isn't a physical antenna for that purpose.

San Franciscans unite to smite alt-right with minefield of doggy shite

egreen99

Apparently it worked.

The white supremacists have canceled their protest. Apparently the thought of wading through ankle-deep dog poop spooked them. Good. Now we can clean up all the dog poop without worrying about any left-over walking poop from the white supremacist's rally.

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

egreen99

SFC's stance would outlaw all commercial use of Linux

There isn't a single commercial user of Linux who hasn't taken advantage of the "Linus Loophole", where Linus says that a self-contained proprietary software module that calls exported Linux OS API's is *not* a violation of the GPL v2. Every single home router, every single vendor of Linux with proprietary kernel extensions (*including Oracle*), every single Android phone that includes an implementation of Microsoft's proprietary ExFAT to handle large flash chips, every single storage appliance that has their own proprietary storage stack including VC and Wall Street darlings like Pure Storage, multiple multi-billion-dollar industries in other words are out of business if SFC's deranged interpretation of Linus's licensing terms gains some sort of legal legs.

But that's not going to happen. They have no -- zero -- standing, which is what's necessary to sue in a court of law. They aren't the people who wrote Linux. That's Linus Torvalds and his merry band of contributors. They aren't the people who chose the licensing terms for Linux. That's Linus Torvalds and his merry band of contributors. Linus is fine with distributing proprietary modules, and Linus (and his designee the Linux Foundation) is the only person with standing to sue here, because it's Linus's code that proprietary modules are calling. It seems to me that this is an effort by a failed organization to get publicity and contributors to keep its founder and only employee gainfully employed making ridiculous statements about things he has no standing to do anything about, rather than anything we should be worrying about.

Hm, a scandal brewing, Kaiser? Healthcare giant buys How Kaiser Killed My Wife and other .coms

egreen99

Re: Henry J. Kaiser: industrial tycoon

The vast majority of K-P members are like me -- we're members because if we get sick, K-P won't bankrupt our family into the poorhouse. We might die because their doctors are from 3rd world countries and are reliant on K-P's diagnostic database rather than on 1st world training, but that's a risk we take. But I don't sugar coat what K-P represents -- they represent the failure of the U.S. health care system to provide care that is both quality and affordable. In the US you can have quality, or you can have affordable, but in the U.S. system you cannot have both. K-P doesn't change that equation.

egreen99

Henry J. Kaiser: industrial tycoon

Henry J. Kaiser was an American industrial tycoon in the 1940's. He had shipyards in California. This being the 1940's, workers were always getting mangled and broken. He was spending a fortune sending workers off to hospitals to be patched up. So he had his idea -- why not have his own doctors and hospitals to take care of his mangled and broken workers on the cheap? That organization became Kaiser-Permanente once it opened membership to other industrial tycoons so they, too, could send their mangled and broken workers off to be fixed up for cheap by a bargain basement chain of hospitals and doctors with a corporate DNA of "fix up people good enough to come back to work, but don't spend a dime more than needed to do that." Cheapness -- and a willingness to kill patients who are too expensive by cheaping out on their care -- is built into the very genes of Kaiser. On the plus side, they won't bankrupt you if you get sick like the other American insurers. You don't know how lucky you Brits are to have the NHS, granted it has some of the problems of Kaiser, but without the venal core of "you'll never be able to work again so we no longer care."