Posts by Soruk

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

Re: Simple fix...

Good one, from Acorn RISC Machine, to: Acorn RISC Silicon Engineering.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: recipients of their binaries

Have something that automatically sucks down all CentOS Stream source packages, and with a developer account grab the RHEL sources, but instead of building them, use them to compare patches with Stream ones. Hopefully if an RPM build version tag matches between Stream and RHEL the patch set is identical so use those version tags to choose which Stream source packages to pick up.

Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime

Re: Right, but do all those businesses...

Wasn't my call, I'm a sysadmin, not senior mangement.

Re: Right, but do all those businesses...

Given their predatory practices I would not touch their Linux with a bargepole, especially at work.

I did experiment with their OEL 8 release on an old Atom box. It ran okay (slow, but it was an Atom), so I tried their Unbreakable kernel. This fell over regularly with illegal instructions, and utterly hosed the RPM database.

Nuked the installation, and installed AlmaLinux 8, and haven't looked back.

At my new employer, we have standardised on AlmaLinux 9.

Re: Right, but do all those businesses...

At my previous employer, Oracle were attempting to shake us down for Java licensing. We screenshotted their slide which showed the cut-off versions of Java, newer versions were chargeable, older ones weren't. Our Linux estate was already OpenJDK as switching to that resolved an issue with the Oracle versions, and Windows was running older versions being compliant with not needing a subscription (and the slide showed us how far we could update to without needing to subscribe). When they then decided to audit us, they were unhappy, as every single Java instance was outside their licensing scheme and they had to admit that we were fine to carry on as we were.

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

Re: Foresight is a wonderful thing

Gamers are the computer equipment equivalent of audiophiles. Surprised nobody has marketed a keyboard or mouse with gold-plated contacts and keyswitches.

openSUSE makes baseline CPU requirements a little friendlier than feared

This might help - https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/631217/how-do-i-check-if-my-cpu-supports-x86-64-v2

One of the answers includes an awk script, so just pointing you there rather than risking a copy & paste glitch.

Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt

Re: point of order

The late-1990s Red Hat Linux 5.0 (the first release with glibc) had a bug where /etc/hosts actually was case sensitive. I can't recall if it was fixed by an update or whether I had to wait until 5.1 was released.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: £sd

Next you'll be telling me that "Ebeneezer Goode" is all about a bloke who likes to liven up parties.

Re: Bank Accounts

With per-minute billing it's possible to use up several minutes in one minute with short calls.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Teams is available for Linux, indeed I have actually found it more stable than under Win10 (I was using AlmaLinux 8). Other solutions exist for Linux, notably Zoom.

Re: Genuine Question

If you're paying for, for example, Red Hat support with RHEL, if the tool you are using is part of their repos (e.g. freeipa) then you will get support from them in line with your SLA. This may be faster than a StackExchange response.

The many derivatives of the CP/M operating system

Re: Origins

How did that even work? Didn't remap the RAM into the bottom 48K of the machine? Normally on the Spectrum the first 16K is the ROM, and most CP/M (Z80) programs assumed a start address if 0x0100. Unless CP/M programs intended for the Spectrum had to be rebuilt for the odd memory layout.

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Re: Too old and eyesight is too bad

Similarly, Microsoft Teams vs MAC addresses. Halfway through your server MAC address you've got a sunglasses emoji [#include <emoji/facepalm.h>]

Re: Eggplant

For some reason I'm reminded of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"

Systemd supremo Lennart Poettering leaves Red Hat for Microsoft

Re: one step forward

Huawei EulerOS is a commercial Linux distro.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS

Pentester says he broke into datacenter via hidden route running behind toilets

Security defeated by a wee bit of lateral thinking/crawling.

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

Re: Control Your Own Upgrades

Fedora has supported in-place upgrades for some time now, no need to nuke and reinstall from scratch.

It can get a little hairy if you have 3rd party repos installed, but last time I tried it, RPMFusion was nicely upgraded as well.

Oracle?

Oracle more trustworthy than $OTHER_VENDOR?

Joke icon because you must be.

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

Re: Yeah

Perhaps a bit of a stretch calling RISC OS "retro" as it is still being developed.

(Microsoft Windows can trace it's lineage back to the mid 80s too, and most wouldn't say that is retro.)

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

667 - the devil's ISDN number.

Re: Sad news.

Wintermute also operated the Cyberia cyber cafe next door to their machine room. This closed when Wintermute got borged by IFB (Internet for Business, formerly Roaring Silence Company).

Ceefax replica goes TITSUP* as folk pine for simpler times

Another way of accessing Teletext services

There is a client (open source, cross-platform) available from the Matrix Brandy developers, which can access some online Viewdata/Videotex and a Teletext service based on Teefax but with additional content not part of the main Teefax service. They also supply standalone builds of the client for Windows and RISC OS, Linux users are expected to build it themselves (or build Brandy and run it from the examples directory!)

2033 is doomsday for 2G and 3G in the UK

It almost makes sense to keep a single 2G network alive with a small slice of bandwidth for GPRS and SMS (no voice) which any existing networks' 2G IOT SIMs can roam on to.

Alma and Rocky Linux release 8.5 builds, Rocky catches up with secure boot

Re: Long term success ?

It may be useful to know that AlmaLinux's migration script can migrate from Rocky in addition to CentOS and the other RHEL clones, and similarly Rocky's migration script can migrate from Alma in addition to the others.

I don't see that as squabbling over each other's user base but instead a very sensible insurance policy for the users should one or the other go to the wall.

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Re: Amateur Opera Society Newsletter

All is well and good until the boss asks you to play his Magic Flute.

Re: Nowadays of course the boot is on the other foot

I forward my work phone into a VoIP-in number on my own voip box. On there I have rules that permit calls when on call and during office hours. Out of hours calls route to a dedicated voicemail box with a suitable outgoing message. The big exception is when I am on leave, the calls go to a message telling the caller I'm on leave and to contact my manager if it's important, before dropping the call (no voicemail).

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

Re: Don't touch FM!!!!

There's a cause for Greta Thunderbird to get behind, all the extra greenhouse gases produced by DAB reveivers compared to FM radios!

WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job

Re: The uneasy feeling about all the MS provided (spy) stuff on their Linux Azure VM's

That's a bit mad, they managed to create a yum repo for their Teams on Linux stuff, you'd have thought they could do the same for this, and drop the entry in /etc/yum.repos.d so it would be kept up to date when you patch your OS.

But no, they didn't.

After quietly switching to slower NAND in an NVMe SSD, Western Digital promises to be a bit louder next time

Re: Already gave up on WD

I had this on my CMR WD Red drives in a Linux mdraid setup. While hdparm has scary warnings on the option to change this setting, it worked for me and I haven't had any trouble since.

So the data centre's 'getting a little hot' – at 57°C, that's quite the understatement

Re: I once had to do something similar in a Skoda...

Almost complete circle, it is broken by a short length of the A282.

Following Torvalds' nudge, Paragon's NTFS driver for Linux is on track for kernel

I evaluated the Paragon driver for my then employer, and back then I wasn't entirely impressed. Sure, it was faster than NTFS-3G but it's error checking left a lot to be desired. Point it at a non-NTFS partition? Kernel panic. Hit a bad sector on your hard disc? Kernel panic. We ended up running with NTFS-3G as running slower was preferable to collapsing in a heap at the slightest hint of trouble.

Audacity users stick the knife – and fork – in to strip audio editor of unwanted features

Re: !Audacity

That would be the RISC OS port.

Re: Hindenburg

They even attempt to justify the name...

https://hindenburg.com/about#/why-hindenburg

Re: How about "Audible City"?

Sadly, Amazon might have a thing or two to say about that.

Playmobil crosses the final frontier with enormous, metre-long Enterprise playset

Re: Shuttle?

Amazon Prime Directive?

UK's competition watchdog gives £31bn Virgin Media and O2 merger the seal of approval

Re: Too confusing

I must have missed the NTL ownership. I may well be wrong but I thought Hutchison sold Orange to Mannesmann. Vodafone did s hostile takeover of Mannesmann and were thus forced to sell Orange quickly, the buyer being France Telecom.

Re: Ownership of MBNL

MBNL was originally Three and T-Mobile. EE inherited T-Mobile's share. O2 and Vodafone were never involved (they have their own, Cornerstone).

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

Been there, I typoed the default gateway when remote configuring a new physical server. No ILO or iDrac either. Oops... (Though it wasn't yet live, thank $DEITY).

I was preparing myself to have to take that long journey to the data centre to fix it at the console, when it dawned on me that I had access to another box on the same subnet. Thankfully this worked and I was able to SSH in and sort it from my desk, but that was a really close shave. Almost too close.

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Re: Obviously

I tend to prefer Book Antiqua over Times New Roman.

And for a fixed-with terminal font? Bedstead.

You want a reboot? I'll give you a reboot! Happy now?

Re: Hands up, intentional mixup

At the minimum I will take a screenshot of the chat and send it to the other party as confirmation of the instruction.

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

Re: if it works...

My leaf blower is reversible, so it can also be used to hoover them up and even comes with a bag that can be emptied into compost.

Barcode scan app amassed millions of downloads before weird update starting popping open webpages...

Re: But which app is the bad one?

It is com.qrcodescanner.barcodescanner

To plug gap left by CentOS, Red Hat amends RHEL dev subscription to allow up to 16 systems in production

Re: Can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

They should have left CentOS 8 EOL at 2029, left Stream in parallel as it is today and jus announced there would be no CentOS 9.

ZIP folders were originally a Microsoft engineer's side hustle until bosses figured out he worked for Microsoft

Yep, the capability was introduced in RISC OS 3, and widely used by applications such as !SparkFS and !ArcFS. The same capability allowed the RISC OS desktop to look inside and access files contained within the PC Emulator (and later PC Card) hard disc image file.

Actually, he released a patch update mid-2020.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Re: Proof reader

That's where you shift to a higher or lower pitch...

Re: Proof reader

Why would you be allowing Delete? Surely the high water mark should be 0x7E?

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: I think you 2 have stumbled onto something there

There is a reason it is sometimes known as "autocorrupt" - even offered by my phone as soon as I've typed "autoc".

Passwords begone: GitHub will ban them next year for authenticating Git operations

My reading of that is SSH keys will continue to work including for new setups and are not being deprecated.