Posts by IGnatius T Foobar ! 251 posts • joined 27 Jul 2018
EMC used to own VMware. Dell picked it up as part of the EMC acquisition and then later spun it off. That's why Michael Dell owns so much of it.
VMware is a key asset because they basically ARE the market for the non-Amazon, non-Microsoft cloud world. And that's kind of important.
One of the biggest values of cryptocurrency is that it isn't fiat currency. There is no fiat holder (i.e. the government) who can inflate it by "printing more". That is why the former vice president and his administration are opposed to it -- it's a good hedge against the US Dollar, which they continue inflating.
"decentralization" and "federation" will only happen once people start ACTUALLY USING sites that decentralize and federate, instead of trusting facebook and twitter with their eyeballs. We understood decentralization and federation decades ago, when most Internet discourse was on UseNet.
Sure would be nice if it stayed down. The Internet would be a better place.
These days I hear a lot of people who claim they don't want to use Facebook, but "they have to because" so-and-so is on it ... the reasons are just as lame as the reasons people claimed that they "have to" use Windows.
As more and more software infrastructure moves to containers, Windows Server becomes more obsolete. Containers run Linux. Yes, you can do Windows containers, but no one is really taking them seriously.
Microsoft needs to containerize the pieces of Windows Server that people actually want to run (such as Active Directory) and then just join the rest of the world in container land.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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