Posts by IGnatius T Foobar â
25 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2018
Why does every single website need HTTPS? Has someone assumed that all websites are eCommerce sites?
Exactly. Perhaps you're just publishing some information for everyone to read. What happens if the page is "insecure" and someone sniffs the connection? They get to read the same information that you already published, with the intent that everyone can read it.
You don't need to encrypt a billboard.
Microsoft has been following in IBM's footsteps for decades. There's no reason to think that they won't stop now. Remember the TV commercials with those hip nuns talking about OS/2 Warp? Mighty enterprise brands go into that weird afterworld as the consumer space loses interest in them. The only reason this new Microsoft is interesting at all is because someone's got to keep Amazon from becoming the new monopoly.
Windows Subsystem for Linux is surprisingly good ... it's good enough that my main rig is fitted for all of the software I want to run from both worlds. (And a wonderful program called MobaXterm makes it ridiculously easy.)
Still, although progress has been made in the UI, I would like to see Microsoft admit for good that their mobile efforts have failed, and optimize Windows 10 for desktops, which is still where 99.9% of its installations live. Come on Redmond, just a couple of beveled edges on those buttons would make us feel like we're using a computer again, and not an overgrown phone.
Here in the northeastern US, we had the same thing ... the regional telco (Verizon) offers true FTTP (the service is Verizon FiOS ... I have it and it's fantastic) ... so the regional cable tv company (Cablevision) started posting ads saying "we've been using fiber for over 15 years!" Well yes, but the fiber only goes to a neighborhood node that serves ~500 subscribers.
To be fair, the use of fiber vs. copper doesn't tell the whole story. What matters most is how oversubscribed the connection is. A typical FTTP BPON is 622 Mbps shared between 32 subscribers, and a typical GPON is 2.488 Gbps shared between 64 subscribers. And remember, that entire wavelength is dedicated to data. That's the problem with HFC and DOCSIS -- they can only dedicate so many channels to data, because most of them are still being used for video.
I've got to be honest, if there were no FTTP available in my area, I'd probably go with DSL instead of cable. Whatever speed you're able to purchase (depending on proximity to the CO), at least you know you're getting the entire channel to yourself, and it isn't going to tank during peak hours when everyone is online.
No one uses halon anymore. It's been retired for decades. In even an old-ish data center you're going to find fire suppression agents like FM-200, which are (relatively) safe to be exposed to. No one is going to die ... at least not until the PHB kills someone when he finds out how much it costs to recharge the canisters. That stuff is expensive.
One reason email persists to this day is because every email system can send mail to every other email system in the world. The XMPP people even built and published the protocols for chat systems to do this, but Slack, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and Google all decided to be greedy and put their users into walled gardens.
Until that problem is solved, email will always reign supreme. Because when you want to send a message to someone who isn't on the same system as you, it just works.
Gartner's normal game is to simply tell everyone that current trends will continue. PHB's pay them a lot of money to do that so that if the prediction is wrong, it isn't the PHB's neck on the line. This model has satisfied everyone involved for decades, and it works well -- but it isn't a good indicator of what to expect in the industry next.
You have to understand why these firms exist. They don't provide "analysis" for our entertainment.
For four years I had a Nexus 5. As with all Nexus 5 handsets, the microphone broke and the only way I was able to conduct a conversation was with the speakerphone. Combined with the woefully underpowererd speaker, this made me hold the handset in the position shown in this article's first photo if I wanted to hear anything at all if I was in a noisy area.
Micro Focus is a company that deals primarily in supporting obsolete technologies (such as COBOL) on modern hardware and software platforms. Attachmate was an excellent acquisition. SuSE, not so much. SuSE needs to be out on its own where it can thrive in the Linux world.
Most of the damage to SuSE was done by Ximian (aka "Novell") where the entire operation was sabotaged by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman. They never really recovered from that assault on what had previously been an excellent Linux company.
As far as most people can tell, all these privacy laws do is cause the distribution of privacy policies to come so fast and frequent that people are in a hurry to dismiss them as quickly as possible without reading them.
Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems (remember them?) once said, "You have no privacy. Get over it." He took a lot of heat for saying that but it's basically true. Privacy is up to us. Third parties simply cannot be trusted.
Take this all with a grain of salt, of course. Gartner leans strongly towards "current trends will continue" so that the people who buy these reports can justify their decision making process and point to the Gartner report instead of taking the fall themselves if something goes wrong. They pay a lot of money to be able to do this.
This is an obvious breach of Constitutional rights which will be quickly struck down if it goes to a higher court. For those of you unfamiliar with the US court system, this kind of thing has happened a lot lately, with federal judges who were appointed by the previous administration (and the opposing political party) taking it upon themselves to legislate from the bench.
Seriously guys, all of this anti-Trump rhetoric coming from El Reg's office in left-wing San Francisco is getting a bit tiring. Can we stick to IT please?
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