Posts by IGnatius T Foobar !

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.

US cable subscribers are still being 'ripped off' by creeping price increases – and this lot has had enough

Forced bundles

Another problem is that they make it very difficult to get "only" Internet. With most cable and fiber providers, the cost of buying only Internet service from them is often *higher* than the cost of an Internet/TV/phone bundle. So you have to allow that sewer main to empty into your living room (that's what television is, really) and take that POTS line that no one ever uses anymore. I know people who take the bundle because it's the cheapest but don't bother renting a set top box because they don't watch television.

If you're lucky enough to have two providers on your street (say, a legacy cable and a legacy telco) then they at least have to compete with each other for your business. Hopefully in the not too distant future the competition from fixed wireless will get stiff enough to tame them down a bit.

Chicago: Why I just grin like a dork... It's my kind of Bork

Re: Jumped up quiche?

It can only be called "pizza" if it is made within 50 miles of the Bronx. New York pizza is "real" pizza. I've eaten Chicago-style and even enjoyed it, but it's really more of a casserole (not a quiche) than a pizza.

Project Reunion: Microsoft's attempt to tear down all those barriers it's built for Windows developers over the years

Again?

Perhaps one reason Win32 and its associated UI toolkits have persisted so long is because Micros~1 doesn't change it every couple of years like they do with all of this modern/metro/whatever tat. WinUI 3 may become obsolete in a couple of years, but Win32 and its UI toolkits will still keep working. After all, the vast installed base and library of Win32/Win64 applications running on Intel/AMD x86 is the primary value proposition for Windows.

And anyway, if you're going to build a UI using an abstraction layer, why stop at Win32 and "modern"? Why not choose one that can also build on Mac and Linux?

Simplify.

Everything OK with Microsoft? Windows giant admits it was 'on the wrong side of history' with regard to open source

Domestic abuse

When I hear "I was wrong, I learned I need to change" from someone who's been abusing someone else for so long ... all I see is a wife-beater saying "Don't go, baby, it'll be different from now on." It's still an abusive relationship, and it always will be.

If there's any reason Micros~1 "loves" open source now, it's because they're slowly moving everyone into their NEW monopoly: the "Microsoft 365" and "Azure" clouds. Those who take the bait will continue to be abused.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Re: All been there

Heh. It's hard to hold a door shut with a 2x4 across the door and a push plate.

Facebook-for-suits puts on a fresh jacket. 'Classic' Yammer is so 2018. Behold, a public preview of 'New' Yammer

Too many tools

Sh*point, Teams, OneDrive, Exchange, and now Yammer ... sorry Microsoft, but your dandelion farm of collaboration tools means I can't find something when I actually go to look for it. These tools are where information goes to die. I've fallen back to just putting stuff on the file server again.

Total Eclipse to depart: Open-source software foundation is hopping the pond to Europe

Bye bye

As an American, I am happy to see any project escape the clutches of communist socialist Silicon Valley.

It is unclear why something designed to pump fuel into a car needs an ad-spewing computer strapped to it, but here we are

Advertising on the pumps...

It may be annoying, but it's better television than CNN, that's for sure.

The iMac at 22: How the computer 'too odd to succeed' changed everything ... for Apple, at least

I would have liked...

I would have liked to have the underpinnings of Mac OS X (unix) combined with the Mac OS Classic desktop. In my opinion OS X made it fast, reliable, robust, and ugly.

Gmail and Outlook sitting in a tree, not t-a-l-k-i-n-g to me or thee

Are they disabling IMAP completely?

Wait ... are they disabling IMAP access to Gmail completely? I run my own mail server and I don't use Gmail for anything, but I do use an IMAP fetch program to scrape my Gmail box, for those occasional twits who assume that your email address *must* be [e-mail]

If that's going to stop working ... damn ...

Red Hat’s new CEO on surviving inside Big Blue: 'We don’t participate in IBM's culture. It’s that simple'

soooooooo naive

India Business Machines is LEGENDARY for its ability to strangle things with red tape. Red Hat is the walking dead; it's only a matter of time.

Microsoft! Please, put down the rebrandogun. No one else needs to get hurt... But it's too late for Visual Studio Online

Questionable value

"In the cloud" can evolve. In a world where monsters like Microsoft and Amazon are trying to suck the entire universe into their clouds, it is better when such tools can be launched inside a container, and the customer can run the container anywhere. This makes it private, portable, and controllable. Say no to Microsoft and Amazon.

CFOs are crossing fingers and hoping a second wave of COVID-19 does not appear, says Gartner

Gartner Goop

Leave it to Gartner to get people to pay them big bucks to state the obvious. Nice work if you can get it.

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

Two spaces for legibility...

Two spaces after a full stop are for legibility, but let's be honest -- the way most people write on the Internet these days, legibility is a distant memory.

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

RTFS

The specification for EIA/TIA RS232 calls out a maximum distance of 50 feet (15.24 meters) so they were already asking for trouble by running it that far across the building. It should have had line drivers in the first place.

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

Tab vs. tabs

Tab Atkins Jr, a developer on the Google Chrome team

The ironic part about all of this is that as a millennial n00b ... Tab probably uses spaces.

Re: Stupid millennials

Not to mention ... if you write your CSS by hand, it's likely to outlive the tools that others are using to generate CSS.

Re: Stupid millennials

I always use Oxford commas and the 4096-color #FFFFFF color space. Feh.

The rumor that just won't die: Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length in 2021 with launch of 'A14-powered laptops'

How about both?

I wonder if it would be viable to place Intel *and* ARM processors in the same computer, similar to how the Commodore 128 had both 6502 and Z-80 onboard. I imagine it would require some sort of special-purpose hypervisor to keep everything running in symphony.

Move fast and break stuff, Windows Terminal style: Final update before release will nix your carefully crafted settings

It's actually decent

It's actually a pretty decent terminal program, and I like that it has a dialing directory just like every other terminal program. Would be nice if we could fire off RDP and VNC sessions from the same terminal. One thing I don't like about it is that when you copy text from this terminal and paste it elsewhere, it brings along the color and style used in the terminal -- most of us just want the plain text.

Interesting that they made it open source. I wonder if it's possible to port it to Linux and Mac, so those of us who use multiple platforms can have the same terminal experience everywhere. I'm getting awfully tired of trying to remember whether paste is Shift-Insert, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Shift-V, or the right mouse button on whatever terminal program I happen to be using right now.

The font they built for it (Cascadia) is interesting. I've been using it as my terminal font on both Windows and Linux. The low height of the cross-strokes reminds me of the look of fonts on old 8-bit computers.

Three years ago, IBM ordered staff to work in central hubs. Now its new CEO ponders mid-pandemic: Is there a better way of doing things?

India Business Machines?

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

Mayday! Mayday! The next Windows 10 update is finally on approach to a PC near you

Linux on non-Linux?

20H1 is notable for the inclusion of a Linux kernel in the form of the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. Where WSL was a compatibility layer, WSL2 uses a lightweight virtual machine to boost both compatibility and performance for Linux

I can do even better! My machine is running Linux on bare metal! No need for a bloated unstable copy of Windows wrapped around it.

Started from the bottom, now we're near: 16 years on, open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape draws close to v1.0

Should move to Qt

Under the covers the big change in version 1.0 is the switch to the GTK+ 3 library.

They should have just gone the extra mile and switched to Qt. I know, it's not easy, but the energy behind GTK+ as a cross-platform toolkit is waning, while Qt was, and still is, designed for exactly that purpose. Wireshark, VLC, and other popular cross-platform software tells the compelling story.

GTK+ on Windows and Mac is kind of an ugly hack, and still carries a lot of weird GNOME-isms with it. In the words of Gollum: "Curse the de Icaza, we hates it forever!"

RAND report finds that, like fusion power and Half Life 3, quantum computing is still 15 years away

Crypto will be illegal

Remember when the export regulations on "strong crypto" were relaxed? That happened because the government became able to break it in real time. If quantum computing (or anything else) brings us to a world where encryption is breakable by anyone ... you can rest assured that the government will make all encryption illegal again. Because only terrorists do that, or something.

We're number two! Microsoft's Edge browser slips past Firefox in latest set of NetMarketShare figures

Does it matter anymore?

During the browser wars of the 1990's it was believed that "whoever controls the browser, controls the Internet." It's clear that this is simply not true anymore. So does the browser matter?

Microsoft's Cortana turns its back on consumers as skills are stripped from Windows 10

Cortana == Clippy

Cortana is just the new version of Clippy. No one asked for it, no one wants it, no one likes it. MAKE IT GO AWAY.

20 years later, Microsoft's still hammerin' Xamarin: Bunch of improvements on the way for cross-platform coding toolset

Xamarin was part of Microsoft even before it was part of Microsoft.

Xamarin, and its predecessor Ximian, were always part of Microsoft. Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman were Microsoft saboteurs working inside the Linux and Open Source community. They derailed the ascendance of KDE as the universal Linux desktop by introducing GNOME and spreading trolltech FUD, and then they derailed cross-platform development by tainting Linux with Microsoft .NET

Those two have been on the Microsoft payroll since LONG before it was official.

Internet samurai says he'll sell 14,700,000 IPv4 addresses worth $300m-plus, plow it all into Asia-Pacific connectivity

Re: Civilian note

You've clearly never tried to run an SMTP service on IPv6 and assume all end users have some IPv6 capability.

What, there are people not using gmail? <<snicker>>

Seriously though ... my mail server is dual-stack and I find that the majority of email that arrives via IPv6 is coming from the big providers (gmail, yahoo, microsoft etc). Pretty much anyone who doesn't host their mail "in the cloud" is still on IPv4-only. I suppose that's a blessing for now, because the majority of the spammers are still using IPv4 as well.

The way you migrate the world from IPv4 to IPv6 is to start moving *consumers* away from IPv4. My T-Mobile service, for example, gives me native IPv6 and NAT IPv4 over a 4-6-4 CGN tunnel. Once the masses are all on IPv6, service providers will want to start providing that native IPv6 support.

(As a side note ... you'd be surprised how many people believe that it's illegal to run your own mail server, because they know that Hillary Clinton got in trouble for it; they don't understand that the email server itself isn't what got her in trouble.)

TeamViewer is going to turn around and ignore what you're doing with its freebie licence to help new remote workers

Re: Apache Guacamole FTW

Yes. Guacamole is mind-bogglingly useful and incredibly underrated for what it can do. I advocate its use everywhere it can be used.

Of course, it is not something that an ordinary user can set up.