Posts by IGnatius T Foobar !

Gin and gone-ic: Rometty out as IBM CEO, cloud supremo Arvind Krishna takes over, Red Hat boss is president

Evil Empire

Microsoft has always followed directly in IBM's footsteps, with perhaps a 20 year delay. So the sooner IBM goes out of business...

Petition asking Microsoft to open-source Windows 7 sails past 7,777-signature goal

oblig

Stallman will then be trotted out to explain that it must now be called "GNU/Windows"

(And it will be given the same response as "GNU/Linux" -- no one important will care.)

Low code? Low usage, more like: Add G Suite's App Maker to the Google graveyard, it's switching off next year

Well then...

...I suppose anyone who built an app with this thing will have to "learn to code"

bwahahaha

Microsoft: 14 January patch was the last for Windows 7. Also Microsoft: Actually...

7 what?

Window number seven? What's that? I couldn't hear you from all the way over here in perpetually supportable Linux land.

VMware has a Pivotal moment in its quest to be 'leading enabler of Kubernetes'

Welcome to the new monopoly.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy recently stated with respect to K8s: "I don't believe in one tool to rule the world," hoping instead to keep customers on its AWS-specific container platform

Yes he does. As long as it's *their* tool. AWS is the new Evil Empire, as Microsoft before it and IBM before that.

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

Have an excuse and rehearse it.

Eventually we become old and wise enough to know how to dodge incoming support requests. Mine is: "Actually I'm a data center guy. I work on big servers and networks. If your computer cost less than $10,000 to buy, I probably don't know much about it."

Chrome suddenly using Bing after installing Office 365 Pro Plus... Yeah, that might have been us, mumbles Microsoft

They both need to lose.

Microsoft and Google are both BigBadCo at this point. Anyone who cares even a little should be searching with DuckDuckGo.

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

Re: Why indeed...

(BTW, consider that my speaker cable is very visually similar to HOUSEHOLD LIGHT CABLE but it's really high-grade speaker cable HONEST, it's just disguised like that so no one steals it....)

That 100m roll of lamp cord from the home improvement store is the very very very best value for speaker cable, bar none. Anything labeled "Monster" is a ripoff.

Re: Alternatives

In a new build I'd say put in 'dumb' speakers and wire them back to a central hub point.

And for those who can't or won't haul cable through their homes ... a simple FM radio transmitter dongle will transmit to any receiver made in the last 80 years, even those from manufacturers that are long gone. And it costs a lot less than a matrix switch!

Frankly I am skeptical that anyone really needs to have the same signal synced to every speaker in the house anyway. My home has built-in bluetooth speakers all over, and not once have any of us ever wanted to play the same source in more than one area of the house.

Re: "Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly?"

I'll see your BA monitors and raise you six NS-10s, driven by Tripath Class D amps. Fed from a custom Linux box with a low-noise D/A, natch.

I'll see your NS-10s and raise you a pair of Minimus-7 speakers, purchased at Radio Shack in the 1980's. Because they'll *still* be sounding great in 30 years when Sonos is a distant memory and none of their products can be made to work anymore.

Sonos speakers don't even work.

A colleague installed a bunch of Sonos speakers in a building that already has a centrally managed wifi network. The speakers refuse to log in to the building network; they insist on creating their own mesh. Predictably, they work fine when the building is empty, but when the building is full of people and the main network is active, they stop working. The speakers have been binned. They don't work.

Looks like the party's over, folks: Global PC sales set to shrink as Windows 10 upgrade cycle tails off, says Gartner

Just built my new PC

I just built a new PC from all-new parts ... something I haven't done in 10-15 years. So it won't count towards Lenovo or HP's bottom line. It won't even count towards Microsoft's bottom line because it runs Kubuntu. And it replaced *two* older computers, so there goes a small shrink in the PC fleet...

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

The Macintosh train keeps rolling...

At this point it should be obvious to Mac users that your binaries aren't going to run forever. From M68K to PowerPC to Intel and now to 64 bit only, Apple has made it clear that they can and will change the underlying architecture at any time, and they're only going to provide backwards compatibility for a short time. Are we going to be good for a while now? Of course not -- everyone knows by now that the next move is to ARM; the only question is when.

Intel teases NUC-leheads with new desktop-class graphics systems and a fast i9 CPU

Build it into a keyboard.

If they want to penetrate the education market even more, they should simply build the NUC technology directly into a keyboard. Schools *loved* the Apple IIgs form factor; they bought millions of them.

HPE goes on the warpath, attacks AWS over vendor lock-in

Gonna take HPE's side here.

Gonna take HPE's side here. AWS is now the big behemoth that IBM was in the late 20th Century, and that Microsoft was around the turn of the century. It isn't good to feed a monopoly. AWS needs to be taken down a few pegs, maybe more than a few pegs.

Do we really want another monopoly?

After living through decades of IBM and then decades of Microsoft, do we really want a third monopoly era, this time of AWS? Anyone in charge of IT at their organization would be foolish to trust their computing to Amazon. I'm not saying don't use cloud; I'm saying don't use Amazon.

Welcome to the new mainframe.

Hybrid cloud vendors are starting to point out that moving your IT workloads into AWS is pretty much like moving them into the old mainframe data center. One big dominant vendor who doesn't care about anyone but themselves. You have to use their tools and you have zero leverage with them, and very little interoperability with other vendors unless you layer it on from the outside. Welcome to the new mainframe.

Managing the Linux kernel at AWS: 'A large team of security experts' dealing with fallout from Spectre, Meltdown flaws

Too much AWS

Too much power and control in one place is not a good thing. Amazon now wields more control over the industry than Microsoft ever did. They need to be taken down a few pegs.

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

Backwards compatible

The way to make IPv6 "backwards compatible" would have been to make addresses variable-length. Initially, all addresses would just happen to be 32 bits in length. But after everyone's converted over, then you start handing out addresses that are longer than 32 bits. In 20 years we'd have gotten there by now.

Variable length addresses would have been compatible with existing routing algorithms that look for the "most specific route" and would give *every* node the ability to split its own address into a network. For example, if your ISP assigns you 100.64.10.10, you could subnet it into 100.64.10.10.1, 100.64.10.10.2, etc. and then downstream you could do the same thing with 100.64.10.10.2.1, 100.64.10.10.2.2, etc. And when someone on the other side of the world sends a packet deep into your network, the most specific address on the public Internet is still 100.64.10.10, and it goes to your router.

Think that's silly? Keep in mind that SNMP OID's are assigned *exactly* this way. You get your *one* number, and you can put as many levels underneath it as you want.

Take IPv4 away from consumer ISPs

The place to begin is by incenting consumer ISPs to move to IPv6-first architecture. For example, if you run Android on T-Mobile you get a native IPv6 address and a fake IPv4 address that is tunneled to a CGN somewhere on their edge. All consumer ISPs should do this. This will incent web service designers to build IPv6-native applications.

SUSE tosses OpenStack Cloud to double down on application delivery

OpenStack != OpenBox

The biggest problem with OpenStack is that no one ever provided a *usable* out-of-box experience. To get anything done with OpenStack you need a team of engineers to build it for your environment.

Kubernetes is definitely a better move. Yes, I know that Kubernetes does not provision virtual machines, and those who think that containers are just "a poor man's virtual machine" are missing the point. When you can run an application in a container, you eliminate the *reason* why most shops dedicate a virtual machine to a single application. With the sandbox effect of containers, many workloads can coexist on the same host again.

HP to hike upfront price of printer hardware as ink biz growth runs dry

Old Is Gold!

My trusty HP LaserJet 5 is still running strong, having been built during an era when quality meant something, and you paid HP prices for HP quality. And since I can still get a toner cartridge for $25, I intend to keep this old workhorse running forever!

macOS? More like mac-woe-ess: Google Chrome slip-up trips up SIP-less Apple Macs

system management...

All of these woes could be avoided if MacOS would simply use systemd like everyone else.

<ducks>

Imagine if Facebook could read your mind: Er, I have some bad news for you...

Block Facebook. Always.

As I pointed out in another thread yesterday ... it isn't enough to just "not use Facebook" ... you have to block them. If there are no Facebook addicts in your household, block them at the router. Otherwise, block them in your hosts file.

Gasp! Google Chrome kills uBlock, Adblock ad filters – grab the pitchfo- no wait, it's OK: They were evil fraud clones

Easiest ad blocker

You'd be surprised how many of the most obnoxious ads can be blocked simply by setting all of Facebook's domains to 0.0.0.0 in your hosts file. Seriously, try it without any ad blocker on and you'll be impressed.

This has the side effect of making your computer unable to access Facebook itself, but that's a feature, not a bug.

Stallman's final interview as FSF president: Last week we quizzed him over Microsoft visit. Now he quits top roles amid rape remarks outcry

Mixed feelings

Wow. I'm not sure how to feel about this. Stallman has been a tumor on the open source community for decades, definitely outlived his usefulness and has been a liability for a long time now ... but on the other hand, I never like seeing the outrage mob claiming another scalp.

I wonder if the mob realizes how much of an extreme anti-capitalist they took down this time.

Service call centres to become wasteland and tumbleweed by 2024

If the first world can't have the jobs...

Honestly, if a job is so simple that it can be shipped from the first world to the third world, eventually it's going to be simple enough to be automated. Looking at it that way, I'd rather see call center bods have some of their functions moved to automation (yes, SOME of them ... you're not going to take the humans out of the equation, no matter how hard you "digitally transform") instead of having all of them offshored.

AWS celebrates Labor Day weekend by roasting customer data in US-East-1 BBQ

Get out

Just one more example of why one company shouldn't have so much of the IT world in its own data centers. Get out of Amazon and find a smaller cloud provider. Diversity is what keeps the Internet reliable. Too much in one place, and you have this kind of problem.

How do you do, fellow kids? Facebook now Boomerbook as British oldies outnumber teens

Re: Hey, remember the 2000s?

BBS's are still around if you look for them. And yes, they are better than Facebook.

uncensored.citadel.org is my favorite.

Good news Flash lovers! Microsoft won't be disabling it by default (so long as you use IE or old Edge)

"old" Edge?

After all, hardly anyone uses Old Edge

Hardly anyone uses new Edge either.

Gartner awakens from trance, tells huddled villagers: 5G revenue will almost double to $4.2bn next year!

Why does anyone still listen to Gartner?

Why does anyone still listen to Gartner? For decades, pointy-haired types have been paying big bucks for Gartner to say (in way more words) "current trends will continue". When a real shift is afoot, Gartner is the last to recognize it. It seems the real purpose of Gartner is to give people CYA when their decision-making causes local oblivion - they can say "Gartner advised us that this trend would continue so we invested in it".

Let's see what the sweet, kind, new Microsoft that everyone loves is up to. Ah yes, forcing more Office home users into annual subscriptions

Re: What a shock!

Compatibility between Windows Office and Web Office is crap too, but that doesn't stop people from using both. Honestly, that argument doesn't sting as much as it used to.

Microsoft's Cortana booted off yet another service while Google and AWS get a bit catty over licensing shakeup

SpySpeakers

geez ... it's amazing that people are still willing to put SpySpeakers in their homes ... regardless of who is providing the spyware. Cortana, Alexa, Siri, and OK Google are all doing the same dis-service to your household.

Web body mulls halving HTTPS cert lifetimes. That screaming in the distance is HTTPS cert sellers fearing orgs will bail for Let's Encrypt

Re: Money spinner

If LetsEncrypt can do that, then why can't DigiCert and the rest of them ? Because they're in it for the money, security is just the cow they milk.

Actually, the protocol used by LetsEncrypt can be used by DigiCert and the rest of them. It's an open standard and all open source software. There's nothing stopping DigiCert from selling you 5 years of service and then providing unattended, automatic certificate updates every 90 days, using the exact same software.

As many as 100,000 IBM staff axed in recent years as Big Blue battles to reinvent itself from IT's 'old fuddy duddy'

India Business Machines?

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

Official: Microsoft will take an axe to Skype for Business Online. Teams is your new normal

Force-marched to Teams

Our IT folks are already force-marching us to Teams. Without the Skype for Business (fka Lync) marked for extinction, we had to go to something else. I wish it wasn't Teams, though. I really don't like it. And the fact that there's no on-prem option makes it even worse.

I wonder if they'll eventually do the same to Exchange.

BT adopts Ubuntu OpenStack as core brains for its 5G, fibre-to-the-premises rollout

Re: Ubuntu

You were lucky to have Linux boxes. In my day we had to make do with Sinclair ZX-81's ... and they outperformed our IBM mainframe.

You can't say Go without Google – specifically, our little logo, Chocolate Factory insists

I don't see the value in Go.

Tried it, wrote a few hundred LoC in it ... gotta say I'm not impressed. For systems-level stuff, C is still king. For portability, garbage collection, type flexibility, etc... why would one want to write in anything other than Python. Go doesn't seem to solve a problem that actually exists.

Years late to the SMB1-killing party, Samba finally dumps the unsafe file-sharing protocol version by default

The story of Samba SMB1 is fascinating.

Back when Andrew Tridgell was building the first version of Samba, he didn't even know that there was such a protocol. He had a copy of DEC Pathworks running, which was a product that allowed DEC machines to act as file servers to DOS and Windows clients. And he basically reverse engineered it, byte by byte, until he had an equivalent server running. There were opaque blobs of bytes that he just reproduced without knowing what they did.

So ... hats off to an excellent hacker who produced something very useful, even before he understood the protocol he was implementing.

Microsoft has Windows 1.0 retrogasm: Remember when Windows ran in kilobytes, not gigabytes?

I used an excellent Microsoft OS back then.

I used an excellent Microsoft OS back then.

It was called XENIX. Ran great on my 80286 system.

Google's Fuchsia OS Flutters into view: We're just trying out some new concepts, claims exec

telemetry slurp slurp slurp

This is basically Google's play to move their spyware directly into the operating system kernel (or, since it's a microkernel, a "userspace module" ... hey, how's HURD doing?). But they'll abandon it once they have their own chip fab and can move their spyware directly onto the silicon.

Red Hat signs off last set of numbers before it is likely gobbled by IBM

Pink Slip Linux

Red Hat seems blissfully unaware that India Business Machines is just going to shutter most of the Raleigh operation and ship the jobs offshore. I spoke with some of our reps and they seem to think that it's Red Hat who will change the culture of IBM, not the other way around. I'd love it if that were true, but somehow I doubt it.

Kids can be so crurl: Lead dev unchuffed with Google's plan to remake curl in its own image

Got it backwards!

There is no reason to do this. In fact, there is every reason to do the opposite. Chrome should be using libcurl as its networking library. I reworked a substantially sized application to use libcurl instead of its own protocol implementations, and was able to shed tens of thousands of LoC. And at the same time, the networking stack got more reliable (because more people have tested it) and we didn't have to maintain any of that stuff anymore.

Halleluja! The Second Coming of Windows Subsystem For Linux blesses Insider faithful

But why?

The thing that made WSL 1 attractive is that it *isn't* a virtual machine. It's a bona fide API translation layer that does a pretty good job at transparently accessing the host's filesystem, networking, and other service. If WSL 2 is just a virtual machine ... then it doesn't offer any more value than simply running an actual copy of Linux under Hyper-V or VirtualBox or VMware. We don't just want it to run on the same computer. We want it integrated. We want it to be so integrated that future versions of Windows would be able to simply run Linux software out of the box.

If WSL 2 is just a VM with a VHD ... there's no value anymore. I'll just uninstall it and run my own VM.

Google: We're not killing ad blockers. Translation: We made them too powerful, we'll cram this genie back in its bottle

Google is the new Microsoft

The gloves are off. Whatever it takes to bypass Google, go ahead and do it. Firefox is now mandatory. DuckDuckGo is a perfectly usable search engine now. Gmail has never been a good idea.

If your broadband bill is too high consider moving to Idaho, they get the internet for free

You can't really support two competing sewage treatment plants because how are you going to route the waste to the one you choose without a whole separate network of pipes? Likewise with water, electricity, or gas.

We're doing it now with electricity. The electricity you pay for isn't the same electricity you get. For every kilowatthour you consume from the grid, your ESCO is producing a kilowatthour *into* the grid. That's why there are separate production and transport costs on your electric bill.

Now, as for wireline monopolies...

There is an easy solution to wireline monopolies. Simply pass regulation stating that the companies which provide wireline connectivity from a central office to customer premises, CANNOT provide ANY services over those wires. And these companies of course can be heavily regulated, since there is limited space on the poles and in the conduits. Then, the carriers who provide services (voice, video, data, etc) simply build out to the central offices and purchase the last-mile from a company they are no longer competing with. Problem solved, with regulations placed only on the part that needs it.

Microsoft Bing is 10: That thing you accidentally use to search for Chrome? Still alive and kicking

Doesn't matter anymore.

Now that Google is just as evil as Microsoft, it doesn't matter anymore whether Bing makes gains at Google's expense.

Anyone who *really* cares, has already switched to DuckDuckGo.

Out-of-office email ping-pong fills server after server over festive break

Re: Exchange?

Hold on there, cowboy. There's a difference between "doesn't know Exchange" and "doesn't hold an MCSE". Holding a Minesweeper Consultant Solitaire Expert certificate simply means that someone knows how to take tests well. It has bugger all to do with the person's actual skill set.

Re: Exchange?

Exchange has become such a beast that now Microsoft simply says "just pay us every month forever and we'll run it for you."