Posts by IGnatius T Foobar !

Debian's Cinnamon desktop maintainer quits because he thinks KDE is better now

KDE

The early 201X's were an interesting time. Ubuntu had just landed and was winning new Linux users by the tens of thousands with its easy and intuitive desktop. Then things like GNOME 3 and Unity started landing, things that tried to turn every computer into a tablet with a keyboard.

KDE had some bad-ish times too, but it's still been my daily driver because it looks and acts like a desktop. It is optimized for devices with an upright screen, and a physical keyboard and mouse. Apple and Microsoft would do well to emulate this.

The Fuchsia is now. Google's operating system lands on real-world consumer devices, starting with 2018's Nest Hub

But why?

This seems more like empire-building than a desire to engineer an OS to replace one that wasn't working. Linux has become the fabric of standard computing. For google to claim it can do better is arrogant. Even the mighty Microsoft is starting to show signs of admitting that ownership of a proprietary OS is a bit of an albatross in the current era. Fuschia is a display of hubris on Google's part.

If you're going to break with an open standard, you'd better have a good reason for it. And they don't.

Google to revive RSS support in Chrome for Android

RSS is essential.

With the big tech firms acting as censorship nannies, the flow of information must be democratized. RSS can be a big part of that.

Cloudflare stops offering to block LGBTQ webpages

Allow any blocks or allow no blocks.

Filtering services should permit blocking of anything the customer finds distasteful. Allowing some blocks but not others puts the blocking service into an ideological quagmire, leading to a downward spiral.

If someone finds LGBTP distasteful, it's no different from someone finding, say, pictures of spiders and snakes distasteful, or blocking sites that make reference to your least favorite computer brand, or perhaps vegans blocking meat sites. The technology provider must not get involved in the moral spiral.

From book shop to tat bazaar to cloud behemoth to grocer, what's Amazon up to now? Augmented-reality hairstyles

Smaug? How about Blofeld?

Jeff Bezos is just a facial scar and a persian cat away from looking like a Bond villain.

More Linux love for Windows Insiders with a kernel update

Dave Cutler is spinning in his grave.

And to think, Dave Cutler designed Windows NT to do exactly this kind of thing without requiring virtual machines or wacko shim layers.

But then the Dwarves of Redmond went ahead and bloated everything into the Win32 layer, just like they did with Win16 instead of fixing DOS.

These people are forever the kings of layering violations.

Slack serves up out-of-order messages, shaky comms as world goes back to work

And doesn’t care what your client interface or backend server is. They all talk the same lingo.

Funny thing about that, eh? Imagine if email had been invented in the 21st century when the current crop of tech behemoths were in charge. You'd only be able to send email to people on the same email provider as you.

The solution to inter-system messaging exists (XMPP S2S mode). But the behemoths refuse to enable it because they love keeping you locked into their system. Google even had it working for a few years and then they turned it off. Right bastards they all are.

New year, new rant: Linus Torvalds rails at Intel for 'killing' the ECC industry

Who is this "Intel" ?

Why is Linus complaining about the predecessor to AMD? Those people are old news.

It could also be argued that complaining about x86 is a waste of time because the world is poised for a move to ARM anyway.

I built a shed once. How hard can a data centre be?

"Right," said Fred.

Please tell me that was a deliberate pun.

IBM bet the company on hybrid cloud. Analysts just rated it a mere 'contender' for hybrid management

India Business Machines

They've still got a few employees in the Western world that they have yet to lay off. It's coming. Meanwhile the IT behemoth of the 20th Century is long gone.

Happy silver jubilee to JavaScript, king of the web at 25 and still hanging on to its crown, for now

uniquity

"TypeScript confers many advantages, but it loses on ubiquity," he said.

That. Right there.

No one, and I mean no one, is going to willingly build towards a Microsoft-only web browser. Those days are, thankfully, over. Web standards are now the universal operating system, and we like it that way. If your device has a web browser, it can run pretty much anything. Netscape is gone, but they won the browser war. The web browser is now the operating system. Now we can run all the same web apps on mobile devices, tablets, Linux desktops, and even obscure devices like smart TV's and Macs.

Office 365 is worse than LibreOffice

Vinegar pointed to Microsoft Office, which a decade ago ran only as native desktop software, mostly for the Windows operating system. Office now can be invoked in the browser under the Microsoft 365 umbrella, thanks to a lot of JavaScript.

It's funny how all the people who whined about OpenOffice and LibreOffice not being "good enough" to operate in a Microsoft Office dominated world, because "document conversion is not good enough", now crow about how great Office 365 is, when the same conversion between the desktop and web versions is far worse.

75% of databases to be cloud-hosted by 2022, says Gartner while dishing on the weak points of each provider

Gartner Goop

Leave it to Gartner to just extrapolate curves and say that current trends will continue, while CEOs pay them megabucks for it so they can cover their arses. Nice work if you can get it.

Internet Explorer fails to make the cut, banished from Microsoft Teams for good

Never thought I'd use a Microsoft browser, but...

I've never used IE and there was a time when I swore I'd never use a Microsoft browser. But the latest Edge is actually just Chrome, but with all of the Google spyware removed and replaced with Microsoft spyware. So on my Windows machine, Edge it is. Why have two copies of Chrome when one will do -- so I went with the one that can't be removed. Of course, there are two important tweaks: one is to install DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, to rid Edge of its ties to Bing. And the "New Tab Redirect" extension is important, to make new tabs open to either a blank page or DuckDuckGo -- without this extension, you can't totally remove Bing Search or MSFN from new tabs. Once those tweaks are in place, it's basically Google-free, Microsoft-free Chrome.

AWS reveals it broke itself by exceeding OS thread limits, sysadmins weren’t familiar with some workarounds

Should be obvious...

AWS is too big, too dominant, and is AS A WHOLE a single point of failure. Use other cloud providers.

VMware names virtual firewalls as first workload it will offload to SmartNICs

Understand NSX-T to understand what's happening here.

For those who are not familiar with VMware NSX-T -- one of the things it provides is an overlay fabric that allows virtual networks to operate without using VLANs. Each hypervisor has a TEP (Tunnel EndPoint) which handles encapsulation/decapsulation of frames on the fabric. Each hypervisor also has a distributed firewall engine, which allows security and forwarding to occur directly between virtual machines, on the same host or on different hosts, without connecting through a central firewall. It does this *today*. But it does it in the kernel.

With a Smart NIC, these engines will move into the NIC, freeing up the host to use 100% of its CPU to do actual work. This is kind of a big deal.

By the way ... hyperscale cloud providers have been doing this for quite some time now. What VMware is doing here, brings it to everyone else.

Banking software firm tiptoes off to the cloud with MariaDB after $2m Oracle licence shocker

databases are a commodity now

Databases are a commodity now. It's difficult to think of a good reason to pay for one. Think twice before putting it into a public cloud, though. Their performance can be unpredictable. Private cloud would be the appropriate place for a core workload like this.

Amazon blasts past estimates, triples profits to $6.2bn but says COVID will cost it $4bn over the next quarter

Jeff Blofeld

Jeff Bezos is just a facial scar and a persian cat away from being a James Bond villain.

'This was bigger than GNOME and bigger than just this case.' GNOME Foundation exec director talks patent trolls and much, much more

The GNOME 2 to 3 transition was no problem for me

...because I run KDE

OpenStack at 10 years old: A failure on its own terms, a success in its own niche

Nutanix is KVM and that's good enough for me.

Nutanix AHV is a KVM-based private cloud infrastructure, and it's easy to set up. If you want the goodness of KVM, and you want to avoid Amazon and Azure, Nutanix is a good way to go -- it's finding a lot of inroads there. VMware is still the big player and they're not slowing down either.

Everyone must work together against an Amazon monoculture.

IBM still not offering future revenue guidance, suffers yet another quarter of falling sales

India Business Machines?

Weren't they some sort of 20th century technology company or something?

Microsoft will adopt Google Chrome's controversial Manifest V3 in Edge

Edge is Chrome now.

On my personal rig I'm running Dissenter (a cousin of Brave, a privacy-focused Chromium browser). At work, I'm running the latest Edge. They all look pretty much the same now. Edge is basically just Chrome with the Google slurping replaced with Microsoft slurping, and the tethers to Google's web properties replaced with tethers to Microsoft's web properties.

After the installation of DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, and another extension to replace the new tab page with ANYTHING other than MSN ... it's easy to forget that I'm not using Chrome.

I'm not thrilled about a Chrome monoculture, but at least the core is open source.

Oracle starts to lose patience with Solaris holdouts

Thank you Sun.

Thank you, Sun Microsystems. You made excellent hardware and software.

But today ... the sad truth is that SPARC and Solaris are legacy platforms. Linux has become the fabric of standard computing. Oracle has not done themselves any favors by continuing the war against their own customers.

Microsoft Exchange 2010 support ends in a matter of days and there are 139,000 internet-facing servers still up

On-prem Exchange is doomed

Micros~1 have succeeded in making Exchange so obtuse, so difficult to run, so persnickety, that no one can run it but them. That's the current play with Exchange 365, and they're loving it.

Anyone who wants to continue running on-prem email and collaboration should be moving to different software. On-prem Exchange is a dead end.

GNOME alone: FOSS desktop folk to start counting in whole numbers again

Point releases are obsolete.

With everything moving to continuous integration and continuous delivery, point releases no longer make sense, especially when you're not in the business of selling major upgrades in a boxed set. Get onto a whole number, and increment it at each release. Come on people ... it is the current year.

Wow, you guys have so much in common: Oracle hotly tipped to power TikTok’s operations as Microsoft deal rejected

But why?

What is the perceived value of Oracle owning TikTok? It doesn't seem to have any place in their portfolio.

The service should simply be blocked. As a US Citizen, I trust President Trump far more than I trust Larry Ellison.

In the frame with the Great MS Bakeoff: Microsoft sets out plans for Windows windows

Like I said, just because they are used, doesn't make it the correct choice. The constant migration towards Wayland (which doesn't support multiple sessions) shows a considerable lack of interest in remote desktop.

Actually there's nothing stopping them from building a Wayland compositor whose "display hardware" is actually an RDP session.

Two different windows are a problem ... so add a third!

Adding a third method to create windows is probably the single worst solution to the problem they could have come up with.

The correct solution would have been to have one API call the other, so it always boils down to the same code path.

Microsoft reprieves SHA-1 deprecation in Edge 85 security baseline

...and no one noticed.

Microsoft made a significant change to Edge, and no one noticed, because no one uses Edge.

Whoops, our bad, we may have 'accidentally' let Google Home devices record your every word, sound – oops

oblig

Plus: Microsoft to dump support for Cortana on iOS, Android phones

I wish they'd dump it on Windows too. Nobody wants Clippy 2.0 on their computer. Nobody.

Amazon gets green-light to blow $10bn on 3,000+ internet satellites. All so Americans can shop more on Amazon

Bezos vs. Musk

So it seems that Jeff Bezos is trying to have a pissing contest with Elon Musk to see who can launch (heh) an LEO Internet Service first. I think my money is on Elon Musk because he's already a spaceman. (But then maybe Mark Shuttleworth should do one, because he's a spaceman too!)

Who am I rooting for? Donald Kessler, of course. I would *love* to see a cataclysmic chain reaction of satellite and debris collisions that takes all of this stuff out of service while creating a beautiful cascade of "shooting stars" every night.

A tale of mainframes and students being too clever by far

Memory protection

It's hard to feel sympathetic to anyone who chose to purchase a computer without memory protection and then expected a multiuser workload to operate on it. Even the most primitive operating system of all time had the "General Protection Fault" exception. The most I was ever able to damage my uni's computers was with a fork bomb, but that was on a line of computers on the Sperry side of Unisys, not the Univac side.

(My university was in Pennsylvania, you see, and at the time there were rules about universities having to buy computers from vendors in the same state if possible. Blue Bell, Pennsylvania was home to Unisys.)

At a university, one is not exactly likely to have the best of the best in terms of system administrators. This is the stuff of legend, after all. But at least this was back in the old days when universities actually taught something.

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

Re: Universal?

Now, would be really clever to get UWP to work in a sandboxed environment on Android, Linux and MacOS

Right. If Micro$oft were to abandon Win32/Win64 and require all user-facing apps to be written in UWP, the *one* benefit would be that it would be a more well-understood target to emulate on other platforms.

You just know that M$ is dying to disable user-installed software and force everything to be loaded through the Windows Store. Windows 10S was a test shot, but they'll try it for real someday, especially if they are forced to follow Apple into the ARM world.

Re: "Red Hat did not get where it is today by giving away the OS. "

It's now part of IBM - it's not what I'd call a success...

And that means one day it will be a part of Micro Focus, if you know what I mean.

All we wanted was the Windows 95 UI + a stable base.

Windows is the desktop. Thankfully, they've failed to monopolize everything else. Linux rules on servers, clouds, and infrastructure. iOS and Android rule the mobile space. No one runs Windows Server anymore except to run Microsoft's own server software.

So what we really want is a desktop. A plain, simple desktop. Give us the Windows 95 UI, and a stable kernel and libraries, and GET OUT OF THE WAY. We don't want Cortana, OneDrive, Edge, Search, or any of that other stuff to be inextricably linked to the operating system.

GRUB2, you're getting too bug for your boots: Config file buffer overflow is a boon for malware seeking to drill deeper into a system

I wouldn't worry about this.

I wouldn't worry about issues with GRUB. It's only a matter of time before systemd handles booting. :)

VMware to stop describing hardware as ‘male’ and ‘female’ in new terminology guide

Orwell was right.

The elimination of "wrongthink" words by the cancel culture mob is no accident. George Orwell correctly pointed out that "if thought can control language, language can control thought." The mob (or more accurately, the masterminds controlling the mob) are removing words to *literally* make it impossible to say things that don't match their preferred agenda.

As an open source developer I will continue to use technical jargon as technical jargon, irrespective of what someone in the cancel mob thinks it means.

Google+ replacement ‘Currents’ to end beta and debut in G Suite on July 6th

IRC

So ... another replacement for IRC that isn't as usable as IRC, like Teams and Slack?

Arm hopes AWS, FOSS, cloud-native combo will wrestle you onto its architecture

Cloud has nothing to do with it.

All of the cloud and cloud-native talk has nothing to do with it. The *one* enabler for ARM is open source software. When entire ecosystems are available as source code, you can recompile them for another architecture. Full stop. It has nothing to do with cloud and certainly nothing to do with AWS. A private cloud or even an on-prem data center can move to ARM just as easily *if* the source code is there. If the move to ARM is a win, that win is credited to Linux and Open Source alone.

New Google rules mandate Android 'Poundland' Edition, Go, for sub-2GB RAM phones once Android 11 is out

Can I have it on a big phone?

Can I have the anorexic version of Android on a big phone, so it actually runs fast for more than the first six months I own it?

Finally, made it to the weekend, time to breathe, relax, and... Cloudflare's taken down a chunk of the web

So that's why 1.1.1.1 DNS failed.

I noticed around the end of the day (eastern USA) that I wasn't able to get to a bunch of Internet sites. I just assumed that systemd-resolved had b0rked itself and I'd fix it later, but when I came back to the computer in the evening, everything was fine. I use the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver, which is operated of course by CloudFlare. I guess I'll just have to set up my own DNS resolver that talks directly to the root servers.

Trump U-turns on foreign student crackdown: F-1, M-1 visa holders allowed to study online mid-pandemic in the US

Enough with the hysteria.

Enough with the hysteria. The leader of the United States is charged with doing what is best for the people and economy of the United States. If a policy is turning out to be ineffective, you change it. Sometimes you have to try several until you find the one that works. This is simply good leadership. This is what you get when you have a CEO in the white house instead of a lawyer. It's unconventional but it shouldn't be.

If you have Microsoft 365 and Windows Virtual Desktop, do you need Citrix? Apparently

Whither Citrix? Wither Citrix?

Honestly, most of us thought that Citrix was going to die years ago when they licensed their core asset (multiuser remote Windows) back to Microsoft for inclusion in the main product. They've managed to stay scrappy since then. Now they're doing the same thing again. There is, of course, the assumption that the whole world wants everything to reside in a hyperscale cloud (Microsoft or Amazon). I assure you it does not. What the hyperscale overlords call "on prem" is increasingly NOT at the customer premise, but in a smaller hosting provider, often in a private cloud that has a more predictable cost model.

CEO of motherboard maker MSI dies after plunging from headquarters' seventh-floor

Fret not, Linux fans, Microsoft's Project Freta is here to peer deep into your memory... to spot malware

There's no Windows version yet...

...because when Windows is detected at all, it immediately goes positive for malware.

Windows 10 Fast Ringers – sorry, 'Dev Channel' – tossed Linux GPU support for WSL2 in latest Insider preview build

Wayland support would complete this.

GPU support is nice for non-graphics applications but it would be even more useful for actual graphics. How about giving us a Wayland compositor that writes directly to the Windows desktop? Suddenly WSL would be light years ahead of all the tools that try to get X11 windows and Windows windows sharing a desktop.

Windows Server to require TPM2.0 and Secure boot by default in future release

Re: Well now....

Microsoft is a niche product in the server market, no sane hardware manufacturer would arrive at the conclusion that a compulsory secure boot is a good idea.

Correct. It is rare for Windows Server to be deployed nowadays for any reason other than to run Microsoft's own server programs (Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc). And with Microsoft trying as hard as they can to push everyone to their cloud-hosted versions, one may wonder what future there is for Windows Server at all outside of Microsoft's own data centers.

Linux has become what Jim Allchin envisioned Windows becoming during the darkest days of the monopoly: "the fabric of standard computing".

Microsoft unshackles WSL2 Linux kernel from Windows 10 image for future fettling via Windows Update

Re: It's not an OS

As for VMS and so on -- some years ago in the NT world Microsoft had a POSIX compliant kernel down there that was actually really useful. For a brief moment in time there was an actual OS down there. That got superseded buy Heaven only knows what.

In the original version of Windows NT, the Win32 subsystem was one of three (Win32, OS/2, and POSIX) that sat on top of a microkernel. But then Microsoft went and loaded all of their bloat into the Win32 layer instead of continuing the proper microkernel architecture.

This is ironic considering they should have learned from their mistake of bloating Win16 on top of MS-DOS.

How about more separation?

Good first step ... now let's see Microsoft allow Windows users to uninstall Edge, Cortana, and the dozen or so other components that are NOT baked into the kernel but prohibited from uninstall anyway.

Before IBM started axing staff, it told them Q3 2020 would be super-busy with post-lockdown catch-up jobs

Q3 2020 would be super-busy with post-lockdown catch-up jobs

"Q3 2020 would be super-busy with post-lockdown catch-up jobs" ... and it may even be true, but those jobs are all going to be in India. It's a shame that anyone still trusts IBM to do quality work when they're just shipping it all offshore to be done by people who work for 10% of the cost but only produce 2% of the quality.