* Posts by J.Teodor

16 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2020

Microsoft tackles SaaSy URL sprawl, dumping its dotcom in favor of cloud.microsoft

J.Teodor

You know it is bad when all admins have https://msportals.io/ as a home page...

Video game players sue to frag Microsoft-Activision merger

J.Teodor

Why is this particular acquisition so problematic vs all the others?

Embracer Group has been buying game companies left and right (not to mention, owning now everything Tolkien foundation had), Tencent has their hands in basically everywhere, Sony has been buying what they can and forcing those studios to release PS exclusives. MS buying ABK seems like a desperate attempt to keep up, not cornering the market.

I am a long time Blizzard fan - I remember when I had to delete everything else from the HDD so I could install both StartCraft and SC: Brood War, playing Warcraft 2 through the night and so forth. Not to mention thousands and thousands of hours of WoW. But the quality of Blizzard games has gone down the drain - or perhaps they stayed the same while everybody else improved. And I cannot see that it could get that much worse with whoever might own them, only better.

I cannot speak for Activision or King games - I did play the first CoD, but not my cup of tea.

After 47 years, Microsoft issues first sexual harassment and gender report

J.Teodor

Re: OK, I'll bite

Founded April 4, 1975; 47 years ago in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.

China is likely stockpiling and deploying vulnerabilities, says Microsoft

J.Teodor

Re: It's a case of supply and demand...

You mean, something like their Red Team? https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-windows-red-team/

Visual Studio Code Server untethers developers from their workstations

J.Teodor

Re: RE: Musk as a Bond Villain

You are right. Sorry. I will from now on only refer to him as "wannabe Bond villain".

J.Teodor

Maybe because Atom was sluggish as heck, the project lacked direction and plugin ecosystem was... not there?

I barely use VCS - I actually don't like it all that much and find the UI very unintuitive, I only use it to edit documentation, as $work requires specific set of linters and such for .md - but compared to Atom...

Also, is there really a such thing as MS fanboy? I use a metric b*tt-ton of MS stuff - it just works, it is not glowingly innovative or something for praising blog posts, so for me, it is feels like it would be a fanboy of "I cannot believe it isn't butter!"

But then again, I am old and jaded. I actually discovered recently there are fanbois [sp] of Elon Musk, and here I was thinking he is white cat short of Bond villain...

Microsoft veteran on how he forged a badge to sneak into a Ballmer presentation

J.Teodor
Boffin

Re: Security...

If you are talking about Windows Hello PIN, then that never leaves the device. In case for Hello for Business, IIRC that involves a private key in TPM and public in authentication server.

Google Cloud takes a gap year. It may come back with very different ideas

J.Teodor

Re: Or perhaps ...

Partially, it is a people problem, but partially it is a resource and cost issue.

Up to a certain number of servers/resources, AWS, Azure and GCloud are a lot cheaper to use than on-prem. I do not know where the break-off point is - it may depend on service type, e.g. if you run mainly simple web APIs or processing jobs, the break-off point may be at tens of thousands of servers, but for databases (including licensing costs), it may be way below hundred, especially if you are one of those unfortunate souls still using Oracle.

And I am not just talking about cost of the hardware, licenses, and running the service - but the environmental footprint of highly optimized cloud data center is probably tenth of what those servers would be in average "cubicle next to toilet" on-prem. Then comes the maintenance costs, and failover, and backups, and regionality, and cost of setting up a new dev server, and... you get the point.

There are hybrid models (we actually use Azure like that) and private clouds, both of which may offer better benefits than relying on a big cloud provider. But YMMV with that.

J.Teodor

Re: Or perhaps ...

As someone, who had to deal with on-prem servers for a long time, I never want to go back.

To beg BOFH for another test server instance to be deployed, or get the god-wannabe DBA to increase the size of your production data store. God forbid the request would be after three o'clock, because that is when the "gods" would be ready to go home, and you would get immediately denied.

No, never again.

My applications run on servers that get automatically patched, I can resize my DB as needed, I can spin up a new test server in a minute or few... and the management is happy, because the costs are way, way down, stability and reliability are up.

This may be a different story if your $JOB has hundreds or thousands of servers, with a dedicated team of data center professionals supporting those servers. But this is perhaps 1..2% of the companies. For the rest, cloud is godsent.

ISO.org outage hits day 3: Still in the dark as the important matter of bunk bed standards enters discussion

J.Teodor

https://www.evs.ee/en is probably what you meant to link, as eve.ee seems to be a furniture store. On the other hand, maybe they have standardized bunk beds...

Microsoft seems intent on buying the gaming industry with $68.7bn purchase of troubled Activision Blizzard

J.Teodor

Re: It will be a mess...

Alternatively, you could change the location where MS Store installs the game. https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Flmgtfy.app%2F%3Fq%3Dchange%2Bmicrosoft%2Bstore%2Bgame%2Binstall%2Blocation

Open source maintainer threatens to throw in the towel if companies won't ante up

J.Teodor
Go

No good answers

I have quite a lot of OSS projects myself - none of these is high-profile, but few have thousands users, and from download stats I know that some of these are used by the largest corporations in the world.

On the other hand, I never expected to be compensated for those projects - these were "I see a gap in AWS implementation of XYZ and this is only a thousand lines of code", or things I wrote for fun and personal use. I don't feel an obligation to keep them updated daily or implement any change that is requested in GH issue. As I give my time away for free, my responsibilities are also minimal beyond OCD "fix every bug"....

This might be different if I would be a maintainer of super-duper-high-profile project, which would consume a significant portion of my day, with those corporations heavily relying and profiting from my work. I would probably want something from them.

One option would be to hire the maintainer - Microsoft hired James Newton-King, the author of NewtonSoft.Json, with the writing on the wall being that his day job would be not only adding gRPC to .NET, but also keep his extremely popular component updated.

I use open-source packages a lot at my $JOB, and I am fairly sure we never really compensate for them. On the other hand, many of these are not quite "leftpad", but something I could reasonably well implement within a day or few - for example, an IPv4 manipulation library.

On personal use, I try to donate to the projects I use a lot - such as KeePass, 7Zip, Notepad++. Yearly $10 is not much, but at least the developer(s) will know that they are appreciated for their work - and perhaps if there are more users like me, they can put more time into the work on those.

.NET Foundation focuses on 'issues with the community' after executive director quits

J.Teodor
Coat

It almost feels like this is a publicity campaign before the release of .NET 6. Any publicity is a good publicity....

Dropbox basically decimates workforce, COO logs off: Cloud biz promises to be 'more efficient and nimble'

J.Teodor

And they have the oddest packages. Smallest and cheapest I can get is 2TB for €9.99/month if I pay yearly. How about 100GB package for €1.99/month, because frankly, that is all I need.

My photos are at Google already, my documents and backups are at OneDrive - but since a lot of my family seems to like simplicity of Dropbox and its sharing, I would happily pay a bit for them. But not €120 for service and size that I don't need.

TL,DR: offer useful package size and don't try to be anything but online storage.

You won't need .NET Standard... except when you do need it: Microsoft sets out latest in ever-changing story

J.Teodor

Re: .NET is still a thing?

I do believe this is the issue with the programmers and not the platform.

Are you having a hard time following what Microsoft is trying to do with .NET 5.0? You're not the only one

J.Teodor

Re: kill the beast...

Yeah, that means that someone was dumb enough to download the full dev bundle instead of client profile of 10..50MB - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/SmallestDotNetOnTheSizeOfTheNETFramework.aspx