Posts by Dave_A

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

But AI isn't alive, so you can kill it and start over

If AI models gradually become poisoned by their own mistakes, there is a time tested solution to this problem....

The same one that gets used when farm animals get too inbred...

Cull and start over.....

If the process of making AI is refined enough....

And if can be nailed down well enough how many 'generstions' can produce useful data.... Then whatever one crosses the line from useful to too poisoned just gets not-done, the accumulated training data gets wiped, and you start over....

Either that or AI watermarking becomes really important as a means of excluding AI generated material from the training data pool....

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

The pay is why.

The US pays more than pretty much everywhere else, at least for white collar work.

The whole mentorship thing ignores geographic dispersion....

At least for some, you're working 'remotely from the office' because your in-office peers are in another time zone.....

Pretty much every large company I've worked for spread it's people out between offices before COVID.....

So we would always have someone (or many someones) on WebEx for any given meeting & any new employees would still be interfacing with their coworkers through IM & WebEx.

Even with everyone onsite.

Half of Dell US staff reportedly opted for remote work

Since you get promoted by job hopping....

Why not stay remote?

15 ish years in IT and never seen one of these all important internal promotions.... Always quit and go work somewhere else for more money if you want to advance....

The whole thing is a huge pile of executive disconnect (eg, they all fought each other to move up within the company & had work lives full of collaboration and meetings, so they assume everyone does) and showing the employees who's boss (a noted point from inside Amazon - 'if everyone stopped bitching about it we'd stop caring about it, but as long as there is resistance we will keep pushing it - WRT RTO things)

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Well, the enterprise Linux scene would have to be completely divorced from RedHat, which is the force behind P's bad ideas becoming so widely adopted

sudo -i

As can LinOTP, and so on....

The main benefit of SUDO

Was being able to keep the root password locked up in KeePass or similar, and have people do admin tasks without having to know it.

Which also means that if someone quits or gets fired, who did admin tasks but didn't have access to the root PW... You wouldn't have to change it....

Re: How long before systemd ...

No registry yet, but it does have its own knockoff of Windows' 'event viewer' binary log database (journald)....

Give Pottering enough time and SystemD will copy all of the microsoftisims from Windows Server in one way or another....

Kind of like his other RedHat compatriot who thought that what Linux really needed was.... .NET! (deIcaza & Mono)...

It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

Re: 24,000 VMs

They're a Rackspace type lower tier cloud provider....

So the VMs are mostly customer servers.

Open Source world's Bruce Perens emits draft Post-Open Zero Cost License

Buying in to this is the surest way to make sure whatever you are developing doesn't get used

Simple enough... The orgs he expects to pay have made a massive investment in internal development teams precisely so they can self support and don't have to pay....

Ask them to pay and they will just not use your software....

Wing Commander III changed how the copy hotkey works in Windows 95

Re: Decent game

Strike Commander. Privateer (using the same characters but IN SPACE), and WC Armada

DOS didn't have standard hotkeys

Other than ctrl-alt-del anyway ...

So any application could use any keys any way it wanted....

In Windows, Ctrl C is copy.

At the command line, it's break.

And in Wing Commander it was apparently cloak

AI hallucinates software packages and devs download them – even if potentially poisoned with malware

Re: Darwin In Action

That one's not anywhere near as dangerous as

curl <url> | sudo bash

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Re: Where are the backups?

Doesn't have to be an insider job if the hackers are good/patient....

Hang out inside the targets systems for a while identifying processes, weak points, and ability to pay....

Then sic ransomware on them after your recon has been completed....

Although in this case it doesn't seem to have worked out since the only reason to burn it all down is if they didn't pay....

I mean, if you get known for shooting hostages AFTER receiving ransom, NO ONE will pay you...

Re: Where are the backups?

I would guess they had backups, but to a NAS or something similar that's networked with the rest of their systems and read-write accessible....

Where were the offline, off-site backups....

Re: Where are the backups?

Because cloud providers charge you for every MB sent outbound....

Also because it's likely to be in the SLA.

Red Hat's Mexican standoff: Job cuts? Yes, but we still need someone to boot Linux

Re: I don't get that, at all

The hardware emulated by virtualizarion platforms is actually pretty old (check out the chipsets that VMware, virtualbox and proxmox present to guest OSes)...

There's no real advantage to emulating the new stuff precisely because it's all virtual anyway (so none of the physical limits that applied for a real G43 chipset (from the Core2Duo) actually apply)....

Re: I don't get that

UEFI is already fully supported in Linux.

So is BIOS.

What is not fully supported, is virtual UEFI machines on many popular hypervisor/virtualization and cloud platforms....

This doesn't mean the hypervisors can't use UEFI physical hardware (they very much can)...

It just means that if your OS no longer supports BIOS boot, it can't be a guest OS on these platforms (or it requires special settings rather than working off the bat)...

And RedHat doesn't want to, for example, kick itself off GCP, AWS or Azure because it decided to go UEFI-only before the 'bigs' were ready for that...

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

That WSL comment...

Ironically WSL doesn't use... systemd.

And Pottering continues to screw up Linux for its primary purpose....

Out of hope that maybe someday, people will use Linux (other than ChromeOS) on the desktop in significant numbers...

Seriously none of SystemD's supposed improvements have much relevance to the hordes of headless VMs or cloud instances that are the overwhelming majority of the installed base....

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

ChromeOS is designed to be safe to give hordes of rampaging 10yos, and still be supportable by the sort of sysadmin who will look at '60k/yr in a union shop (at least in the states the only place you find IT unions is local govt - and they are epically parasitic) and think 'where do I sign'....

For the US the overwhelming majority of Chromebook sales are to K-12 schools, and it is the appeal of a totally managed, super locked down laptop that sells them....

Working from home could kill career advancement, says IBM CEO

Well at least he recognizes that some people don't want to be managers ...

Unlike Amazon - where more or less 'face time is important for the management career track, and so everyone has to come in'.....

Although it will eventually fall back to all the ladder climbers being in the office and grumbling about why no one else comes in (were too busy working, vs spending all day trying to kiss ass and get promoted)....

US defense tech veterans call for a separate Cyber Force

Re: Each Existing Force Does Counter-Cyber-Stuff Differently

The #1 problem is pay.

To get really good people you have to start your pay scale right around the general officer levels....

The rest of the DOD pays on a standardized rank/time-in-service scale.

An effective cyber force has to have starting pay in the 6 figures.... Not at 50 or 60k/yr like a new 2LT gets....

Will only work if it has its own separate pay scale

Otherwise the best and brightest will laugh and go work for FAANG type places....

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

True in-re 'the cloud'...

Since the cloud is just timeshare computing wrapped up in pretty new marketing speak and a modern UI...

AWS strains to make Simple Storage Service not so simple to screw up

Yeah ...

If S3 was as easy to admin as a NetApp filer it would be far more secure....

Re: well, der

Can't really run an enterprise application off USB sticks ...

San Francisco investigates Hotel Twitter, Musk might pack up and leave

Self inflicted by Elon's stupidity

You wouldn't need to provide beds if you.... Let your staff work from home....

How GitHub Copilot could steer Microsoft into a copyright storm

And more specifically, how many are reasonably probable from a competent programmer....

If we get to the point where copyright is granular enough that a single line of code is copyrightable (eg 'cout << "Hello World";'), we are just as bad off as we would have been if Oracle had won the Java suit....

At least for the US the legal purpose of copyright is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" - which allowing the copyright of complete software works (libraries, programs, etc) does, but allowing the copyright of individual lines of code does not.

The question is where-in between does the line get drawn, and that ends up being answered by lawyers & judges at the end of the day....

So if you teach yourself (as a human) to code, partially by reading open-source code....

Is every program you write a 'derivative work' of the OSS code you looked at while learning to write your own? Does a professor using an excerpt from the Linux kernel in a lecture cause all students' work to be derivations of Linux and bound by the GPL?

Even if all the code does is output 'Hello World'....

Because that is the logical 'end' of the argument being made here against CoPilot..

One would think the OSS world would not want to go 'there', and would want to stick with a more logical derived-work definition - wherein a derivative work has to be substantially similar to the original (eg, MacOSX Mach kernel is a derivative work of the BSD kernel, but a 'hello world.c' program cannot be a derivative of Linux even if the author (or authoring program) examined Linux code in the process of figuring out how to write C that will actually compile)....

At least for the US, there is also Google v Oracle to consider (and the anti-CoPilot position here is remarkably similar to Oracle's losing argument over being able to copyright and license the syntax of Java).

Shareholders slam Zuckerberg's 'terrifying' $100b+ Metaverse experiment

Re: Facebook is dying

Nah, they are just moving to purely-video social media, as actually composing and reading text is apparently too hard....

Zuck has the right idea, 50 years too early

The up-and-down-of-it is that Zuck realizes that whoever invents the 'Oasis' of Ready Player One fame will be the richest man on the planet.

The problem is, the tech just isn't there to do 'that' yet, and thus he's not going to be 'that guy' starting this early & with the amount of effort he is applying - as he'll run out of resources before the hardware is 'there' to actually do it.

The idea of putting on present-day VR gear to socialize politely (and nothing more - remember: the RPO metaverse allowed virtual violence, competition, vehicles, etc) with cartoon avatars just makes no sense...

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

The point of PDF is 'signature required' forms...

If you want to create a digital form that can be either printed out & hand-filled, or filled out digitally & digitally signed/encrypted/locked (think government/military paperwork)... PDF is pretty much the only option...

Yes, you can do forms in HTML, but you can't do the kind of 'once you sign this, all of the fields above are unchangeable' offline form-filling thing that PDF does, if you use HTML.

Browsers have had PDF support for years, but that PDF support has never included the *forms* functions - you'd get an error message if you tried to open a PDF that was a fillable/sign-able form...

Presumably this is what Moz is adding to their in-browser PDF reader....

Microsoft accidentally turned off hardware requirements for Windows 11

It seems that MS wants to bring the 2yr cell phone lifecycle to PCs....

Ignoring of course that the main reason that 'works' is that most phones batteries are toast after 2-3yrs and people upgrade anyway regardless of software support.

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

Times change.

Can't speak for the UK, but in the US the thought of doing tech work for the same employer for 10 years is almost unheard of. Quitting also often produces a bigger raise (at your new job somewhere else) than staying.

In a world where you work for one company for 3-5yrs and move, a lot of the trappings of classic business culture just make no sense.... Pensions aren't portable, retirement accounts are.... Club memberships for people who retire with 10 years of service? Who's going to stay long enough to qualify?

Given that, it's not surprising that companies shift their benefits expenditures to fit the amount of time workers will actually be there....

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

Re: Serious question

One more thing... It's truly amazing for managing VMWare hosts.... As opposed to pointy-mc-clicky in a web browser...

New MS released it for Linux so you can actually have a Windows free world, and still use pwsh for managing ESXi virtual-appliances (which use photon Linux as their base OS)....

Re: He should feel kind of ashamed

It was designed in the era where Ballmer ran Microsoft and Linux was a threat to the bottom line not a universal fact of IT life & included Windows feature.

Stuff like Ansible wasn't really a big thing back then either, and if it was see-above on mid/early 2010s MS and nix-y tools....

Yes, they should have gone with a Bash derivative and exploited the existing knowledge base..... But the same argument could be made for NT way back when (NT being mutant VMS because the Alpha and PowerPC were going to give Intel a run for their money (oops))....

Re: Serious question

No.

It's more like 'what if we built a command line interface around a hodgepodge of VB and JavaScript'....

It's A-LOT more functional than cmd or the old VBscript, but it's got no connection to the (much more established) UNIX command line, as it's a product of early-2010s Ballmer-run MS not the 'we make our money in the cloud & bundle a Linux environment with Windows' 2020s version....

2015 was the Year of the Linux Phone ... Nah, we're messing with you

'Not counting' Android makes no sense.

Just because it runs an alternate GUI & package-manager, vs X+(desktop-of-choice), doesn't make it any 'less Linux'....

And with Google heading towards a 'desktop-y' interface, it is probably the only chance Linux has of being a mainstream desktop OS...

There's also the whole 'Chromebook' thing, which has (Arguably) been more commercially successful than any given conventional 'desktop linux' effort...

In the mean time, FreeDesktop/RedHat/Mr Pottering continue to screw up 'conventional' Linux by trying to glom the worst features (binary logs, random & paralleled start-up sequence, monolithic 'one program to rule them all' design) of Windows onto it...