Posts by tracker1

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

If you haven't had any personal experience since you were a young teenager that changed your opinion and haven't otherwise grown as a person since you were a young teenager. You are a pitiful human being

I believe in growth and rehabilitation. And I'm not an advocate for holding someone's childhood against them as an adult generally speaking.

I'm not sure I support sending a govt database over email in general. That said, what is the database? What does it contain? Was it sent through secure servers, through secure servers to a secure endpoint? The answer do matter because the security will vary.

I've heard some really bad stories in the finance space.

I'm any case there's plenty of facts of the case without digging up someone's childhood and getting overly politically biased. I truly feel sorry for Gen Z and beyond who will see no privacy in practice.

Developer wrote a critical app and forgot where it ran – until it stopped running

That's a funny story that the me today would find impossible to do. The me of a couple decades ago could probably have done differently.

These days, I'm such a staunch advocate for co/cd and containerization it would be incredibly unlikely. Not to mention that I now actively avoid direct access to production servers.

Strap in, get ready for more Rust drivers in Linux kernel

Re: Such awful interop

A C header doesn't tell you who is responsible for allocation or deallocation.

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Re: Marketing

I didn't really start switching away from OS/2 until late in nt4 lifetime and fully with windows 2000. I had a dual boot for games for a few more years though.

Last time I tried OS/2 I couldn't even hardly remember how to use the things.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Aren't C# and Java about as old now as C was when they were created?

Re: Is Go really memory-safe?

Odds are that's happening at a C library boundary. Possibly intentionally.

Not just Rust

While articles like this the to put the focus on rust specifically. Go, C#, Java and other languages are also on the table and in broad acceptance.

I like rust a lot. I find that it's pretty good for even mundane tasks like web API development even. But it's far from the only option being considered and used.

Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6%

Re: "why the kernel commandant"

The HTML in question isn't the issue here. The server is delivering a file for HTML, and one or more files for js, css etc that is all highly compressible text. One image is usually more payload than all the HTML, CSS and JS combined.

Malicious exploits can target the server, others can target a client. Each have differing mitigations.

Servers can operate in read-only for system mounts to reduce risk, as well as process isolation and containerization. The ladder techniques can also be used in a client browser. For Linux clients, this means appimage/flatpak/snap. Windows and Mac have different but similar approaches for browser isolation.

None of this has anything to do with the complexity of a given website.

Python dethrones JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub

Fart Apps for 2025

I kind of feel that this metric of kinda meaningless especially I'm the context of AI you projects. It's like this decades equivalent to a fart app on the iPhone 15 years ago.

Everyone uses the same templates and goes through a few steps. But do they actually understand what they're doing or making anything different and productive?

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Damn Shame

In the end, I wish this had gone better. The no touch license made anything out of the gesture a non starter for pretty much anyone who could do anything with the project.

The third party source references made the personality even more murky. In the end, there's not much that can be done.

I wish there was a rough modern equivalent player that didn't suck. I didn't know that there is any such beast. It least not with anything that resemble the community and ubiquity of winamp at its peak.

For that matter, I'd like a good Linux version.

Fresh court filing accuses Oracle of creating 'maze' of options 'hidden' in 'contract'

Never use Oracle or IBM

This is just part of the expansive mountain of reasons why I will never use Oracle or IBM for anything if I have any input over the matter.

Oracle owns nearly a third of Arm chip house Ampere, could take control in 2027

Re: This is going to kill Ampere

That is largely my concern as well. I tend to avoid both Oracle and IBM kind of like a plague. I simply don't trust their sales and licensing teams.

All said I am both sad and disappointed that every cloud provider is doing its own spin on arm. This pretty much keeps all workloads at the minimal common denominator.

Between this and Intel spinning off its fabrication business we live in interesting times indeed.

AWS claims customers are packing bags and heading back on-prem

Most serverless applications are pretty easy to migrate to self-hosting.

Too true. What cloud resources can offer for scaling often requires certain design and development approaches.

Putting an access app on a terminal server in the cloud doesn't do anyone much good at all. I've literally seen this.

Similar for many rdbms apps. You doing get magical scaling by putting it in a cloud server, but keep the queries with dozens of joins and trying to scale to thousands of users.

It's the bottom line.

I think it largely comes down to AWS pricing not looking up with 4+ generations of performance and memory uplift. AWS pricing per core should have come down over time as many core processors became more common at lower process relatively speaking.

There are now 128-192 core monsters at or less than the 8-16 core options from a decade ago. Pricing in the cloud hadn't kept pace at all. Similar for memory and storage.

It's now crossed a point that the convenience of cloud isn't worth the higher margin costs to the customer. Combined with the fact that horizontal scaling is far less of a requirement than on hardware a decade or more ago.

Lastly, leveraging tools like Kubernetes is pretty much the same in prem or cloud.

That doesn't go into a lot of the not complex cloud configs either. Especially for internal apps.

It will get more interesting for SaaS providers though.

Europe's largest council could face £12M manual audit bill after Oracle project disaster

Re: Hmm.

Don't forget as excessively fine grained security models that will never be used in practice that make it all exponentially more complex.

Re: how different can councils be

There is the flip side to trying to create a central authority for software. In that you're likely to have one that really bad solution over many lesser bad solutions. Government work in general is very litigious and trying to normalize that with software is off more difficult than expected.

This isn't to say that Oracle didn't screw up. They most likely did

Re: how different can councils be

I can't speak to UK in particular. But governments are often very difficult to build software for. Usually weird and conflicting requirements and unknowns.

I worked on an election software and the variance in legal rules across countries and states was staggering and painful to build for. Each county or state added to twice as long as the last one to implement and doubled the test surface.

I still generally avoid IBM and Oracle though. They take cost overruns to a whole new level.

Typical Oracle

T this sounds like a typical Oracle project. And totally the reason why I never touch anything from Oracle or IBM if I can avoid it at all possible.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Working with a very large client project using SAFe right now... OMG I can't believe anything will actually get done within a year of early timelines.

That and all the Visio diagrams asking the way. Sigh. At least it pays well.

Is it agile or is it scrum?

With regards to the article, is it self organizing teams worrying with stake holders, or is it some bastardized project management approach?

Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick

Re: More Information Needed!

My guess as well. I'm thinking the ex husband got a much better deal from this oops than otherwise likely. Alimony or child support, etc.

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Re: I wish them luck

Only if you and everyone with you leaves their phone behind and doesn't have a modern car.

Re: I wish them luck

If you work in a Fortune 100 company, your HR is likely already using a service to follow you and every other employee far more closely than you may realize it be comfortable with.

You might genuinely be surprised. This practice is only growing.

Re: I wish them luck

The Snowden leaks demonstrated that it's already possibly to meaningfully utilize the enormous amount of data being collected. I used to think it was way too much to be useful before that. I can only assume the technology has improved dramatically since.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

Re: So, a nice week-end then

It was probably an array in a degrades but working status.. The order was to wait unless it went down. The guy was in standby in case it went down.

It's actually pretty understandable

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

Re: This feels like an own goal...

I've stuck to laser printers the past couple decades. My current and previous were HP models though not sure if/when this one dies (it's a decade old) if I'll do HP again.

The last ink printer I had was from Canon. I didn't print though and though the ink was cheap, it seemed like every time I wanted to print the head was gummed up. I was able to clean it a few times but replaced it twice in the two years I had it.

I'm the end, much happier with a color laser where the toner lasts me years. I've replaced the black and colors ready once and have another black cartridge for next year when that runs out again. I can go months without printing it do a few hundred pages every day. They're proverbial tanks.

Yeah, the printer itself costs like 6-8x as much and the toner is 2-4x an ink cartridge, but both last so much longer it isn't funny. Better still if you only need black and white.

My only regret is not getting one with a duplexer... Then I'd be much more inclined to do dual side printing. I've messed up trying to do that with odd//even printing a couple times and it isn't fun.

Rust developers at Google are twice as productive as C++ teams

Re: I wonder...

I didn't have a crazy amount of experience with C/C++ or Rust. I've read a lot of all of the above. Generally the Rust code has been much easier to reason with. The lifetime syntax feels a bit weird to me though. Otherwise it's been pretty straight forward.

Re: "More productive"

It really depends on what you're doing in C/C++ vs Rust. Things like linked lists and other structures are harder to do in Rust with patterns like vectors already in place to help you with less cognitive overhead.

Idiomatic Rust can be very different from C/C++. Usually when learning a language I'll rewrite something I'm more familiar with in the new language. Getting a good grasp of the language Dynamics will often have you doing certain parts very differently.

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

Meh...

I know that Mozilla needs some form of monetisation. That said, they literally had enough to cover development funding for decades in the bank a few years ago.

Instead of focusing on privacy and technology, they spend all the money on also ran efforts and fund raiser events. Just pouring money into marketing and VPN companies. When the belt needed tightening, they fired engineering instead of middle managers and marketing staff.

I just don't have a lot of sympathy for the organization and management. They need a return to management born off engineering mindsets. Not whatever fluff they've been pushing the past decade.

AMD crams five compute architectures onto a single board

Frankenbeast....

For the geek in me, this is impressive. On a practical side, I'm not sure how well this will work. It feels almost worse than the Intel accelerators in terms of usability and ergonomics.

I'm not sure how one would leverage such a beast in practice. Almost anything you might do would likely leave half the capability sitting idle or be too complex to maintain on the software side.

It does in a way feel like the ultimate developer platform to be able to use these different technologies, but I don't know if it will be good in practice.

Google throws $1M at Rust Foundation to build C++ bridges

Re: Why is this news?

I agree.. this will find anywhere from 4-8 dev for a single year depending on location, taxes etc.

Will have to see what approach is taken, but C onterop is well defined... C++ is just, expansive to say the least. Of course this could just mean some magic that the rust compiler does,. Taking on the responsibility of also handling C++ compilation to LLVM, etc.

Either way, just guessing a few years of work on compilation followed by a couple more on LSP integration to make it more useful in practice. Lintinng integration on the C++ side will also likely be a necessity and take time.

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

Typing in the start menu

My usage has generally been to press the start/super let in the keyboard and type the first few characters of what I'm looking to run.

Of course I also ran insiders builds for years. A couple years ago I saw an ad in the results. Since then my personal desktop has been booted on my Linux drive. I've booted into Windows twice since, once for Windows updates and then to run a firmware update for my hardware.

While but perfect, the old programs structure was better than the approaches since windows 8. I think the windows 7 start menu was probably the best they've done.

Microsoft touts Visual Studio Code as a Java juggernaut

Yeah, I'm not sure about their narrative on this one. I love VS Code, and don't care for Java. I'm not sure that VS Code can go far enough to meet what IntelliJ offers... Java Dev just triggers heavily on an IDE. And frankly, I'd rather see Microsoft improve the C# experience in Code.

I think the decline in Java usage is more about Go, Rust and Python gaining ground. Not to mention C# actually being open source now.

My own use of VS Code is nearly as much time in the integrated shell, I don't use a lot of extensions all that heavily.

CompSci teachers panic as Replit pulls the plug on educational IDE

Don't get it...

I'm not sure that I understand the problem. From the comments it looks like it's about some AI grading which is BS just based on what AI generated for all but the most trivial code.

For the Dev, there's VS Code and other IDE options with free education licenses. For the collaboration, there's GitHub, GitLab and other options for free or cheap. These are tools people use in the real world.

Just my own $.02

BlackBerry to split into two companies, foraging for tastier fare for shareholders

If Blackberry had created email integration apps for iOS and Android from the beginning they would likely still be relevant today. They had integration for exchange servers well ahead of everyone else at the time. They could have kept their niche as well as possibly made custom hardware for Android.

But they wanted to beat their own path and got out offlanked.

Venture capital firm makes 'unsolicited' bid for MariaDB buyout

That was literally my first thought. All said, I prefer PostgreSQL.

Google exec: Microsoft Teams concession 'too little, too late'

Re: Windows Server?

You seen to be comforting NT and 32-bit Windows software.

Re: Windows Server?

Just be glad you never went down the rabbit hole that is Windows Containers...

Oh, the windows server update literally broke every application that you have deployed?

Re: Windows Server?

SQL Server runs under Linux and even in Docker. Not to mention PostgreSQL does more than MS SQL Server in many ways and has a better dev experience overall, while supported by every major and second tier cloud provider.

There is literally no compelling reason to choose MS SQL Server for a new project.

As to Windows Server, sure if you want more complex deployment and live to pay more money to run your software. Even for the C# apps I've written in the past decade, they're all containerized and deployed in Linux.

Really!?!

This from a company that has literally killed more projects actively used and profitable than I can count at this point.

Including GCP deployments and most recently domains.

And it's not like Hangouts isn't included with Google Apps.

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

Risc-V where available

Time to start pushing for more Risc-V solutions where available.

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

Re: C#

C# was also not an expansion or rebrand of J++…

Re: C#

VB.Net uses the exact same runtime as C#.. There's no VM to it.

I'm tempted to create something like arm-holding.tld with only a picture of someone holding another's arm or an arm with something in the hand. No mention of the tech company.

Maybe a message about Chinese business culture for snark.

Why do cloud titans keep building datacenters in America's hottest city?

I'm in Phoenix with a limited roofline for solar. Fewer panels than most houses my size. It's covered more than half my summer energy and almost all of the cooler half of the year. May not be oak efficiency but definitely works better than I had expected.

A major Cc company days center in Phoenix has 3ft concrete walls. Another of a major ISV has 3x what most commercial buildings have. Not sure on phxnap but it's uncomfortably cold in the server space.

Servers generate way more great than people. Data centers are usually really well insulated and some use massive water cooling systems to control heat dissipation.

The three Phoenix data centers I've been in are around 60°F in the server space and close to 68 in the rest of the building. It's unfortunately cold if you aren't used to it.

Most offices are 68-75 in Phoenix. Will really vary.

Not as bad as it sounds...

Phoenix is very geo stable. Very little risk of natural disaster. Can't speak for all,. But a few high security data centers have buildings with very thick concrete walls and don't take as much cooling as other buildings in the area. The server racks do take a lot of power.

Fortunately, Phoenix is fairly stable for power generation and use, unlike the west Coast by contrast.

The heat in oak summer sucks. Most people stay inside and many have remote start. My 2016 Dodge can start remotely from my phone. So it's cooled off by the time I get to it. It's not much worse that places that are always cloudy and rainy though.