Posts by IGnatius T Foobar !

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

obv

Clearly there was a Strategically Placed Hole in the lab's security perimeter.

OctoX is a radical Rust implementation of a very old OS for RISC-V

C will never be replaced.

The world is littered with the bones of languages that tried to replace C. Many have come and gone. Many will continue to come and go. C is the perennial king for a reason. Long live the king.

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

Sounds less than feasible

This sounds less than feasible to me. It's clear that IBM does not want Blue Hat Linux clones to exist, and when IBM decides they're going to screw something up, they put the full force of their bureaucracy behind screwing it up.

I for one am ready for the world to retire the RPM ecosystem.

Intel mulls cutting ties to 16 and 32-bit support

It's about time.

Pretty much everyone wants a machine that uses UEFI that boots straight into 64-bit long mode, and then runs an operating system with a 64-bit kernel. As long as 32-bit software can run once the operating system has booted, no one is going to lose any sleep over it. Linux users moved on a long time ago, no one is running MS-DOS on bare metal anymore, and even Windows stopped being able to run Win16 binaries quite some time ago.

It's time to face the fact that the 8086 architecture simply wasn't elegant enough to maintain compatibility throughout the ages in the way that, for example, the IBM 360 architecture was. Let it go.

Microsoft finally gets around to supporting rar, gz and tar files in Windows

The best development environment for Windows...

...is a virtual machine running Linux.

Developers everywhere agree.

Google's claims of super-human AI chip layout back under the microscope

There is no such thing as "artificial intelligence"

There is no such thing as "artificial intelligence" and there never will be.

There, I said it.

The GPT programs that the less intelligent portion of the tech world are clamoring breathlessly about are impressive, but call them what they are: a natural language interface to whatever body of data they have been given. They are not "thinking".

Publishers land killer punch on Internet Archive in book copyright court battle

History

I have some reservations about Internet Archive, even though I am a personal friend of Jason Scott.

And this isn't really Jason's fault, but IA has a habit of easily rolling over and obeying any authority that wants something taken down. This happens if it's a copyright holder, or if it's someone of wealth and/or power who wants something "inconvenient" scrubbed from the record.

archive.org is useful to preserve things that might otherwise fall into the bit bucket. To keep things from being "erased from history" use archive.today or archive.is instead.

Chinese web giant Baidu backs RISC-V for the datacenter

Take your pick...

Take your pick ... a chip that is bugged by the Chinese government, or a chip that is bugged by the Chinese *and* US governments?

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

Microsoft always follows IBM, with a 10-20 year delay.

Microsoft always follows IBM, with a 10-20 year delay. To know what happens to Microsoft next, one need only study IBM history. Gates and Ballmer learned how to be cutthroat monopolists by watching IBM, and everything Microsoft has done was built from that playbook. Lock-in tactics, treating the rest of the industry like garbage, lying cheating stealing, the whole nine yards.

Microsoft is only relevant now because their cloud has permitted them to turn into a "services company". Just like IBM did.

Now, Microsoft is following in Big Blue's footsteps by mass-sacking employees on their home turf. Those jobs will magically re-appear in India and other dirt-cheap labor markets.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Yes, Linux is unix.

Yes, we know that Linux doesn't use the original kernel, and isn't part of the Open Group or whatever, but it is the spiritual successor to AT&T's original offering. Linux won. Linux won everything. AIX is dead. Solaris is dead. HPUX (pronounced "H Pukes") is, thankfully, dead. SCO is dead but they'll zombie up every couple of years to sue someone.

Unix won. Thanks to Linux. Do you remember who had the early lead during the Unix Wars? It was Microsoft, with Windows NT. Go back to the late 1990's and hearing about "moving to NT" was as common as hearing about "moving to the cloud" is today. It was Linux that saved us from the dystopia of a Windows monoculture. Not IBM, not Sun, not HP.

Linux has become what Brian Valentine told us Windows would become: "The fabric of standard computing."

The fate that has befallen AIX, Solaris, and HPUX will also strike Windows Server in due time. The writing is on the wall. No one runs Windows Server anymore except to run Microsoft's own server software, and most of that they'd rather have you run on their cloud. Azure networking runs on Linux. Azure Cloud Shell runs on Linux! There is no future for Windows Server, any more than there is a future for AIX. It's merely a matter of time.

God bless the Linux Operating System, the new holder of the Unix crown.

C++ zooms past Java in programming popularity contest

"widely used" is not the same as "popular"

Java is the new COBOL -- the lingua franca of business logic. If that makes it "popular" then I'll take a hard pass. thank you very much.

C forever!

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

UKI in EFI System Partition

UKI is short for "Unified Kernel Image" and combines the Linux kernel and initrd into a single file, along with some other smaller components, allowing the whole thing to be cryptographically signed.

Great. Now how about storing the resultant UKI in the EFI System Partition, eliminating the need for a boot loader?

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

Re: No. Stop it.

Linux, STILL, does not have the end-user application support necessary to win the desktop. PERIOD. END OF DISCUSSION.

Ooh I see, you're playing the 1990s Slashdot argument game. I'll play the other side?

HOW MUCH DID MICROSOFT PAY YOU TO SAY THAT?

The problem with a cloud-hosted Windows desktop...

The problem with a cloud-hosted Windows desktop... is that it then becomes very easy to have several of them. One for work, one for home, one for some special project ... and the next thing you know, some of those users begin migrating to "no desktop" (basically Chrome OS or something equivalent) or even a cloud-hosted Linux desktop ... in addition to the Linux that's running their thin client.

In other words, "dual boot" becomes something you do by just signing your thin client on to a different account, instead of messing with your computer's boot settings and potentially wrecking the existing OS if you get it wrong.

That's a "vulnerability" to Windows dominance that Microsoft would have fought with everything it had twenty years ago. Today, they don't care as much, because the bulk of their revenue now comes from cloud services. Their desktop monopoly is a sideshow now, and with desktop revenue decreasing it will eventually change from an asset to a liability.

Re: Not sure I agree about that...

So if Linux can give me an alternative to AD that I can use in small SMB environment, then maybe I can deploy it and save some money for my clients by using Linux.

I assume you've looked at FreeIPA? It's feature equivalent to AD and can set up two-way trusts and replication if you're trying to supplant AD in an existing environment.

Water pipes hold flood of untapped electricity potential

This is ridiculous.

Extracting electricity from the flow of water in pipes will reduce the flow of water to where it needs to go. That'll be great when the fire department can't pump it high enough.

By the way, if the water was in a water tower (which most towns have), it is pumped INTO the tower USING ELECTRICITY. You're not saving anything.

And in an urban setting, high rise buildings often need their own water towers (look at a photo of NYC rooftops) which require filling from the water mains USING ELECTRICITY.

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11

In related news...

In related news, 10 out of 10 PCs will run Linux. And you actually get a better operating system than Windows 10 *or* 11.

You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie

Windows is obsolete

Even Microsoft knows that proprietary software is obsolete. That's why they've switched over to being a cloud provider, so you can pay them forever for *access* to software instead of for the software itself. I daresay it's a better business model, and even ESR said so in his final blog article before he gave up on the blog actually working [ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764 ].

Locking customers into a cloud is more lucrative than locking them into low-quality proprietary software.

Please stop using Windows. It is obsolete.

USB-C iPhone, anyone? EU finalizes charging standard rule

oblig

"But they make the best adapters."

Linux kernel 6.0 debuts, Linus Torvalds teases ‘core new things’ coming in version 6.1

Running out of fingers and toes?

Perhaps it's time for Linux to stop using semantic versioning and just go to a straight numeric sequence of build numbers with no decimals in it.

The open internet repels its most insidious attackers. They’ll return

free as in freedom

The only appropriate path for the Internet is LESS governance, not MORE. The Internet works best when it is the Wild West. Governance leads to choke points and censorship. There are already too many of "those people" trying to turn the West into another China. They'll ruin the Internet given even a slight opportunity. We must not let them.

BT CEO orders staff: Back to the office or risk 'disciplinary action'

And a year from now...

...the news will be... BT has announced record losses as they continue to be unable to keep up with technology advances and consumer demands. This news follows the ongoing mass exodus of talent from BT after their CEO ordered all employees back into the office last year.

(Sorry dude, the modern workplace is remote; you can't put the genie back into the bottle.)

In Rust We Trust: Microsoft Azure CTO shuns C and C++

Fad languages

Fad languages come and go, but C is a workhorse for the ages. Remember when the new hotness was Ruby on Rails? Yeah, me too. Rust and Go will eventually ... well, rust and go.

The next deep magic Linux program to change the world? Io_uring

Windows is obsolete.

As revealed this week, Microsoft chose to port eBPF into Windows rather than try to duplicate its functionality with its own program. io_uring may become the next Swiss-Army tool for Linux developers.

Windows is obsolete. It carries on as a majority desktop operating system, for the time being, only because of the momentum of its massive installed base. Everywhere else, it is in decline and everyone everywhere agrees that it is a developmental dead end. The cloud runs on Linux. Mobile runs on Linux (Apple variants notwithstanding). Containers run on Linux. Software-defined storage/networking/etc. runs on Linux.

In the data center and in the cloud, no one chooses Windows Server anymore, except to run legacy software. Windows Mobile is dead. Windows Embedded is dead.

Microsoft would do well to continue porting Linux technologies to Windows, but at the same time working to phase out Windows entirely.

Google CEO Pichai: We need to up productivity by a fifth

Big Tech companies should simply divest

Seriously. Break themselves up. Let each business unit live or die on its own.

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Gen IV reactors == win

Generation IV reactors are literally incapable of melting down, and some designs are even capable of consuming previous generation reactors' waste as fuel.

Regardless of how you feel about "global warming" (I'm a skeptic) we ABSOLUTELY NEED nuclear energy as part of the mix. It is abundant, scalable, produces zero emissions, and when produced by Gen IV reactors, completely safe.

The obstacles to nuclear power are political, not scientific.

(And no I am not a NIMBY ... I live within glow-in-the-dark range of a nuclear station and it's never been a concern for me.)

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Well written.

Yes, on the Microsoft timeline, perfection was achieved with the Windows 95 user interface. But of course that was mostly stolen from RISC OS, the idea of a fixed taskbar and a window manager that did not maximize windows on top of it. Combined with the rest of what PARC and later Apple put together ... we never needed to go anywhere else.

The job of an operating system is to run the selected programs and then GET OUT OF THE WAY.

Micron wants tax breaks for '$160b' Texas chip fab plant

Manufacturing in the West is needed

Whatever it costs, it's worth it. The West needs to bring its manufacturing back. We cannot rely on the instability of the current situation.

T-Mobile US and SpaceX hope to deliver phone service from space

This is cool for another reason:

This is cool for another reason: T-Mobile is the network partner for "GoGo Internet", one of the larger providers of Internet access aboard commercial airline flights. Right now they get their signal by pointing their antennas DOWN at T-Mobile towers, but in the future they could point UP at satellites.

(This is the reason T-Mobile subscribers get a free hour of wifi aboard those flights, by the way)

California to phase out internal combustion vehicles by 2035

This will harm automobile sales in California...

...as consumers simply go out of state to purchase the new vehicles of their choice. It bears a striking resemblance to the people who will travel TO California to have legal abortions. It's almost as if states rights are an actual thing?

Broadcom in talks to buy VMware: multiple reports

Not the first time VMware has been owned

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.

New Windows 11 build boasts inbox updates and UI tweaks

Re: tabs

Really? There's no combine option anymore? FFS. I always set my Windows machine at work to small icons, never combine, include the labels -- just like it was in RISC OS (from which the Windows 95 desktop was copied).

Feh. At least I've still got KDE on my own machines.

Biden issues Executive Order to tame digital currencies

Misses the point

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.

Web3: The next generation of the web is here… apparently

decentralization and federation?

"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.

Windows Terminal to be the default for command line applications in Windows 11

It's about time.

This is long overdue. Now fix the rest of the OS :)

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram deplatform themselves: Services down globally

And Nothing Of Value Was Lost.

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.

Report: Microsoft and AWS scored $50m in contracts after Google pulled out of Pentagon's AI drone plan

too much

In case it isn't already obvious ... there is WAY too much concentration of power in AWS and Azure ... both need to be broken up into bite-size pieces.

Microsoft slips out Windows Server 2022 with extended support for 10 years

Windows is obsolete

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.

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.