Posts by Korgonzolla

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix and was involved in my own little way in stripping out Netscape code once the fork was made. I've never moved from it since, and still find it to be a highly-performant and capable browser. I'm also okay for the most part with things like Sync and Pocket, even if I don't use them myself.

An open-source browser that often made decisions by mind-numbingly long message lists was never going to be able to compete with a company who realised that owning the engine and browser was their path to enormous profits and domination of the end-user experience for billions of people.

Mozilla is now a vassal of Google. That is not a good thing, but at least we still have a browser that offers us some level of control over the end-user experience.

The Internet has lost a lot of what made it exciting and new. The suits won.

Gartner: Oracle probes orgs for Java compliance after new licensing terms

Re: Oracle really is the worst.

I’ve spent the last few years working for a global organisation who have aggressively moved away from everything Oracle. No Oracle DB, no packaged Oracle DBs sitting underneath an application, complete rewrite of applications off the Java stack, no support for Java on their virtual desktop and Citrix environments, end-user device level software licensing running to ensure nothing has Oracle underneath the hood. It’s a strategic objective of the CIO and CTO functions.

VMware turns 25 today: Is it a mature professional or headed back to Mom's house?

First job in IT was as a graduate in 2005 working on EMC Symmetrix and migrating hundreds of physical Windows Server boxes to SAN and VMware. It's easy to forget just how revolutionary Vmware was at the time. I know the concept of virtualisation wasn't even that new at the time, as the guys in the Mainframe team kept telling us, but it really felt like we were working with technology that was very different than had gone before.

The less said about the unholy trilogy of Windows Server clusters, VMware, and EMC SRDF the better though.

Google unleashes fightback against ChatGPT, a Bard by any other name

I'm no great fan of Microsoft, but Nadella is some operator. MS were facing the same fate under Ballmer as Oracle find themselves in. Not going to go away, but too late to the party when it comes to things like cloud.

He ditched their doomed mobile strategy and went all in on cloud. Bing is the default search engine here in work, and I don't find it any worse than Google these days. I think that's more to do with Google starting to become much less useful over the past 5 years, than any sort of massive breakthrough on behalf of MS.

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

I've this impression that a lot of the commentators on The Reg are gnarly old Unix admins who still maintain the last boxes in their organisation running VMS, AIX, and OS/390. Getting nostalgic about VIM, having to deal with "the business" in getting time to backup to tape, and operating the first BBS in Norfolk.

Time not spent in a state of nostalgia about how good their job was in the good old days is taken up with drinking cask ale, watching test cricket, and moving ever more slightly to the right each year.

IBM Consulting assimilates cloud firm for Azure expertise

The major issue here is not knowing what IBM cloud offering is even named.

Dark-mode Task Manager unveiled by original's creator

Strong neckbeard vibes.

20 years of .NET: Reflecting on Microsoft's not-Java

Steve Ballmer really milked the old Microsoft model as far as he could. He was right though when he went on stage in some state of excitement and proclaimed 'developers, developers, developers'.

C# is a flawed, but beautiful language for the type of programming it is needed for.

Visual Studio and VSC are flawed, but beautiful environments for people who write software to work in.

Powershell is a flawed, but competent environment for automation.

Azure is a flawed, but competent environment for delivering computing workloads based upon the software being written by users.

You might not like MS; but they have the nuance to remain relevant.

Microsoft revenue up by a fifth as world shuffles through the pandemic into the metaverse

Nadella has really turned the ship around from the late days of Ballmer. If they'd hire one of Ballmer's yes men then you could see them being like Oracle today - late to the cloud game, sweating their existing customers to keep revenue streams, and probably still trying to make smartphones that no one wants to buy.

The Azure UI is still a hot mess, but the news from Seattle is that they are poaching lots of the top talent from the modern day sweatshop that is AWS.

Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee

Signed up for this in 2007, so annoyed it's coming to a relatively sudden end. I only used the email functionality, so I've been exploring the options today:

1) Custom domain allowed in Office365 family. Already have a subscription, but the two drawbacks are: only one custom email address per family user, need to move my domain registrar to GoDaddy.

2) Cloudflare Email Routing - involves moving DNS records to Cloudflare, but that is no issue. Currently in beta, but people appear to get access quite quickly. No idea if and when they might start charging for it.

3) Zoho Email. €1.13 per user per month for custom domain email with 50GB mailbox. Reports on the mobile app and web interface are largely positive.

It's a rather petty little thing, but I'm involved in a tender at the moment for a >10000 employee firm who are deciding on which cloud provider to move to. Google were unlikely to win anyway, but my scoring will reflect my personal annoyance at this decision.

Ever wondered what it's like working for Microsoft? Leaked survey shines a light on how those at the code coalface feel

That's what I found working for MS. The overall package was decent, but you had the potential to make more working for Google, AirBnB etc. However I noticed way more people joining MS from those companies than leaving to take up roles.

MS felt mature if that makes sense. It felt like a 40 year old company. There was a lot of lifers there. It was also a very tech first sort of company. I've worked for two of the big audit firms who are now trying to pass themselves off as tech consultancies. The only motive there is upselling, and trying to undermine the IT departments of the companies they mole themselves into. In MS you know you are working for a firm that wants to sell technology. It's not always the best technology, but you do feel there's a common goal there.

Not a fanboy I swear.

I worked for MS for a number of years in a cybersecurity role (we did exist!), and to be honest they were a pretty good employer all round. The salary was about average for the time; the hours were pretty much 9-to-5, could work remotely when required, performance bonuses were generous, and the package overall was good. I did work with a few lifers who mentioned the horrors of the late stage Ballmer era, but the early Nadella period was fairly optimistic I must say.

You always feel like you're a small cog in a very big machine there, which is true I suppose.

One of the better places I've worked tbh, which I know won't go down well with the regulars around here.

Browser tracking protections won't stop tracking, warns DuckDuckGo

The whole idea of privacy on the web has started to bother me recently. I know it always should have, but I ignored it as I felt the drawbacks of online advertising and tracking were more than covered by the benefits of free access to web services that would otherwise cost money.

It might be boredom, but in the past few months I have:

Ditched Chrome in favour of Firefox. Firefox is a really good browser, so this wasn't a major headache at all. In fact I prefer it over Chrome.

Finally made use of that Raspberry-Pi and set up a Pi-Hole.

Set up containers for Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft in Firefox.

Moved to DuckDuckGo for the majority of my searches.

Use DecentralEyes extension so web resources such as fonts and web libraries are delivered locally.

Moved from Gmail and Google services to a small business account in Office365. Yes, I know it's Microsoft, and I'll be downvoted to oblivion by the regulars, but in this instance Microsoft just aren't as evil as Google. I consider 9 euro a month good value for what they offer.

LastPass to limit fans of free password manager to one device type only – computer or mobile – from next month

Got the email from Lastpass yesterday. Signed up for Bitwarden, and 15 minutes later I had imported my password list from Lastpass, installed apps on iOS, Windows and Linux, configured 2FA, and installed the browser extension on Firefox. Trivially easy process.

Subnautica and Below Zero: Nurture your inner MacGyver and Kevin Costner on an ocean-planet holiday

Subnautica is a great game, but, for me, The Long Dark is the very pinnacle of survival games. No zombies, no aliens, just the Canadian winter as your enemy. The sandbox mode can be brutally unforgiving - when you die you're dead. No save files, and back to the start. And you will die eventually. There is no happy ending.

Project Ticino: Microsoft's Erich Gamma on Visual Studio Code past, present, and future

I'm no great fan of MS in general, but I must admit I'm a big fan of VSCode and Windows Terminal.

Oh dear, IBM. Storage isn't looking like a cash cow any more, is it?

I always thought the XIV was a nice piece of kit that the IBM guys didn't know what to do with when it came to selling.