Posts by ayay

Microsoft ducks politico questions on Copilot bundling and lack of consent

Re: Wipe Out

I desperately want LibreOffice to be great.

Yet, every single time I use it - and I am a VERY casual user - something weird happens.

A crash is pretty much guaranteed, and I always save my stuff on muscle memory just to be sure. Yet, today, it wasn't that. Instead, my very simple spreadsheet wouldn't do a simple SUM. Had to save, close Calc, then open it again. Then, all was well.

I had extremely simple needs, and yet get frustrated every single time, and I am an IT professional. I am also a proud FOSS evangelist, and loathe the 365 business model. Still, it's hard to recommend LO for anyone doing anything even remotely important.

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

Re: Major major cock-up

Why do some people always have to throw “diversity” into it?

Look, I am one of those “dirty foreigners”. I find myself fighting with management to do things right, to no avail, of course.

And yet, as soon as things done wrong catch up with them, others quickly line up and point at ME for the reason why it wasn’t done properly.

Really?

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Re: Question

(I am not British)

Priti Vacant? I had to Google. Sounds like that famous song from the Pistols, wonder if the shoe fits… seems so.

Tesla's purported hands-free 'Elon mode' raises regulator's blood pressure

Re: I for one can't wait till this works

Insurance is what kills it for me.

Re: I for one can't wait till this works

Same in Canada.

Official: Microsoft unbundles Teams in Europe

What about the others?

No love for MS here, but Apple and Google need to be shaken for the same reasons too!

Brave cuts ties with Bing to offer its own image and video search results

Re: Brave search, not great yet

And yet, here in Canada, it thinks we’re looking for the American counterpart.

AI misses the I once again.

Seriously, boss? You want that stupid password? OK, you get that stupid password

Re: perhaps the MD knows enough about Unix to know that the password couldn't be all numbers

I also make a point to look 180 degrees from where the keyboard is.

Elon Musk finally finds 'someone foolish enough to take the job' of Twitter CEO

Re: Linked article lists Maggie as an example

Lisa Su, AMD.

If they hired her thinking of the Glass Cliff, it did fail miserably.

Intel bumps up core counts for 13th-gen vPro chips

I am doing my part

I am now responsible for ordering servers, laptops and desktops. I grew up seeing Intel general douchebaggery.

All our servers are Intel, all our desktops are Intel, our laptops too. Until now. This year, everything will be AMD. Suppliers who don’t want to deal with AMD are being replaced.

The fact that they are hurting makes it even better in a twisted way. AMD was what I could afford back in the day, and not only Intel pulled all sorts of shady maneuvers to kill them, they forced us all to a decade of mediocrity in the aftermath of it.

That’s nothing. As far as I am concerned, they need to suffer even more. And until AMD stops being the innovative powerhouse they became after rising from their grave, I will enjoy the schadenfreude in all its glory.

Intel chairman exits just ahead of next financial report

Karma

I remember the shady deals Intel architected to pull the rug from under AMD, almost killing them for good in the process.

As soon as they noticed AMD was over, complacency set in.

As soon as AMD had Ryzen (pardon the pun), Intel reveals themselves as nothing more than a dead man walking.

Some of you know what they say about Karma...

Part of me hopes they don't manage to get out of that so easily (aka lobbying), and have to face the music: good, old fashioned innovation, just like that competitor they almost buried.

After roasting Nvidia for overheating issues AMD now has its own

Re: Well to be fair...

Agreed 100%.

This is a manufacturing issue. Standard RMA, nothing out of the ordinary.

More important, it fails gracefully.

Mildly annoying, but seeing that AMD acknowledges the issue, pretty straightforward.

Ad blockers struggle under Chrome's new rules

Re: Easy as solution

I find google to be worse for thinking it's smarter than you, adding results you didn't ask for.

Re: Advertising weary?

Not necessarily.

I was on a channel for space exploration nerds, and stumbled upon an ad for a razor.

Two oddly specific things, seemingly unrelated. The commonality was that both the channel and the razor manufacturer are Canadian.

I bought the razor. And it is amazing.

I ad block the hell out of everything otherwise. As far as I am concerned, niche ads are the way to go.

Green alert: SaaS giants may use sustainability to justify price hikes

I look forward to that, honestly.

Something to do with history and repeating mistakes.

California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave

Re: Odd statement ... There are four lights...

Of course, it's only the common folk that have to change.

See: plastic bags.

Arm sues Qualcomm over custom Nuvia CPU cores, wants designs destroyed

Re: RISC-V

I'd agree with you, but this is Qualcomm.

In this case, we shall call it karma.

Intel shows how chiplets will form Meteor Lake CPUs

Re: There's also...

As it stands, they're saying they will. They're not doing it.

Yet?

Amazon fears it could run out of US warehouse workers by 2024

Too much coke

The upper echelon of most publicly traded companies need to lay down the coke, stat.

'Bigger is better' is back for hardware – without any obvious benefits

Re: Not all hardware is bigger

I can't even find anything lower end than an i5 or Ryzen 5 pretty much anywhere. Even from OEMs.

Akamai's Linode buy: Good for enterprise, risky for others

I hope I don't get burned by saying this, huh? Got it? Got it?

Well, there's OVH.

It's no Linode, but neither is Linode.

Internet 'spy system' delayed because nation can't get the equipment

Re: Maybe some companies don't want to get involved with this

Wasn't it Cisco who provided kit to the Great Firewall of China?

It did not seem to affect them much, if at all...

Belgian defence ministry admits attackers accessed its computer network by exploiting Log4j vulnerability

I do agree with you.

Still, more often than not, we (as an industry) get away with it.

The beancounters are playing the odds. They win, we lose. And so it goes.

AWS power failure in US-EAST-1 region killed some hardware and instances

Re: faced with the need for a sudden rebuild

Well, OVH is cheap and the scrappy underdog, so of course we'll beat them. Losers!

Now, AWS is too big to fail, so people act like the lap dogs they are, making excuses on their behalf.

Then we wonder why it always seem like the biggest douchebags keep getting ahead. Maybe it's because we can't possibly forgive the underdogs for any mistakes, but are willing to make excuses for the dominant players before they even have to come up with some bullshit.

See also: AMD between Intel's Core and Ryzen, Microsoft, and many others.

CentOS Stream 9: Understanding the new Red Hat OS release for non-Red-Hat-type people

CsntOS Stream 9 subscription

CentOS Stream 9 has subscription-manager by default. Makes no sense to me.

But why that VPN? How WireGuard made it into Linux

WireGuard is the best

I have mentioned this somewhere else here, but I need to repeat it every time I can, because WireGuard is the best.

My mom has a circa-2014 router (TP-Link WDR4300) running OpenWRT. I do need to VPN there every once in a while.

Being OpenWRT, I was able to use OpenVPN. But... it. was. a. dog. Bandwidth was TERRIBLE.

Of course, the damn thing was not state of the art in 2014. I got it on sale, clearance even, so there it is.

Yet, with WireGuard, it's almost like I am there. It flies.

The same goes for my phone, laptop, pretty much all devices that roam around with me, yet are always connected to my network. It is robust... and fast. And secure.

Yes, there's a little fiddling around to get it all set up, as it usually happens with Linux and friends. After that, though, it just goes on and on, and you leave nothing on the table. Resource efficient, secure, simple. Gets your stuff VPN'd in, makes sure that site-to-site VPN you need is iron-clad and speedy. I could go on and on!

Nextcloud and cloud chums fire off competition complaint to the EU over Microsoft bundling OneDrive with Windows

Re: Wrong angle?

Eh? The documentation is open and quite good, better than most open source projects.

The license prevents the bait and switch of "open source until it suits, then we take the ball and run, thus making it ours".

What am I missing here?

All change at JetBrains: Remote development now, new IDE previewed

aaaaand we are back to Subversion!

Git's rallying cry was its decentralized model.

Now, the new thing is to centralize everything.

We have come full circle to Subversion!

Dell: We and our customers understand the supply constraints now. The 'wildcard is logistics'

Re: Dell Laptop Options Worse Than Before

Thank Apple for that. Now everybody wants to solder it all and "streamline" their offers for maximum... shareholder value.

Red Hat forced to hire cheaper, less senior engineers amid budget freeze

I was going to post the exact same thing.

Obviously, I was beaten.

Who did not see that coming?

Let us all witness "the great squeeze".

WireGuard VPN gets native port to the Windows kernel

WireGuard is the best

Fast, reliable, easy, runs on a toaster. Or almost.

Get any OpenWRT-supportrd router and have it in, performance will be decent at least. Most often, it'll be awesome. Now try OpenVPN. Yes, I know, I've cried too.

People way smarter than I am vouch for its security, so what are - the not-corporatey fellows who are looking for something reliable and secure, not a stamp of approval from the likes of SolarWinds - waiting for?

US govt calmly but firmly tells Blue Origin it already has a ride to the Moon's surface with SpaceX, thanks

cry moar?

For people who preach that their underlings should just leave whenever they don't like the breadcrumbs they're getting, these gazillionaires sure cry an awful lot.

Microsoft releases Windows 11 Insider Preview, attempts to defend labyrinth of hardware requirements

hardware requirements

If that doesn't change, the year of Linux on the desktop may be upon us, brought by the most unlikely chain of events to boot.

Many serviceable machines are 7-10 years old, and many people in first world countries are having trouble to upgrade, let alone the third world. You find TPM 1.2 in some, most won't have anything.

Hell, even new machines won't make it. The machine I bought a couple of months ago - 11th Gen Core i5 - does not have TPM 2.0, thus incompatible. I can get a module, but I assume these are probably overpriced by now, just like everything else.

Deluded medics fail to show Ohio lawmakers that COVID vaccines magnetise patients

Re: Struck off?

I was going to comment just that.

A perfect example of "no good deed goes unpunished".

'Welcome to Perth' mirth being milked for all it's worth

Re: Sydney thinks it is Oz

Perth, Ontario?

Canadian province's supreme court orders Dell to pay nearly $500,000 to sales rep fired in his twilight years

Re: Oh dear. Now Dell will need to raise its prices again to pay for this settlement...

Who thought that leaving the decision about the employee collecting (or not) their due rewards up to the companies employing them - thus paying the bill - would have a different outcome?

PCs continue to sell like hot cakes and industry can barely keep up with demand – analyst

I have an i7 950 running in production for rendering work, being tortured daily for 11 years and counting.

Would I like something snappier? Hell yeah.

Do I have it handy? No. Does it still run? Yes! So it will.

Dam it: Beaver ate our internet, says tiny Canadian town of Tumbler Ridge

*Especially* because it's Canada, this is a valid question.

But, in this case, beavers are a more likely explanation. The damn creatures are vicious. Adorable, but vicious!

University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired

Re: Qiushi Wu [ ... ] and Kangjie Lu, assistant professor at the school

Funny, I was also waiting for someone to blow that particular horn. It was bound to happen, for reasons that must be clear to you, considering you're the one who did it.

And you can keep your contempt and hints and whatever else makes you sleep well and comfortably smug at night. Yet, a mess such as the one we are witnessing would not be sponsored by any intelligence agency: too noisy, self-defeating as an intrusion mechanism, AND wakes up your enemy. Lose, lose, lose.

I do not follow the mantra of "not attributing to malice...", but it is apt in this case.

Now, if you have a (war) drum to bang, and reason need not apply, do carry on.

Re: Qiushi Wu [ ... ] and Kangjie Lu, assistant professor at the school

That makes no sense.

I assume the Chinese intelligence services would rather not publish their findings if that was the case. Just get the bugs in, and carry on exploiting them later. They would definitely not publish their findings on a journal.

Intel accused of wiretapping because it uses analytics to track keystrokes, mouse movements on its website

Well...

...they can cry foul, but wiretapping is pretty much what it is.

Backblaze on the back foot after 'inadvertently' beaming customer data to Facebook

what's the scrappy option now?

I remember Backblaze was the scrappy newcomer, cheap and effective, using consumer grade hard drivers and running all sorts of data collection to see how cost-effective that was.

Then, they stopped doing the consumer grade stuff. Maybe the enterprise gear is more cost effective? Or are they going full corporatey?

That answers the question. I wonder who's the new scrappy guy that has to prove his worth currently, because Backblaze is one of the boys now.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: I love the way developers...

"As unnatural as it may seem to you, not everyone in the world wants to boot to a command line after a fresh install. Nor do most user wish to have a computer that doesn't connect to the internet."

Then don't.

It is amusing how some people get offended by the fact that others want to do the weirdest things with the time, equipment, and expertise - all the while making the fruits of their efforts available for others who share the same passion, for FREE! How can that be offensive?

And yes, it is also amusing how people compare Windows - pre-installed on most new consumer grade hardware - with any Linux distro, which you will most likely have to go through the effort to get set up and running. Not to mention the leverage Microsoft has on hardware makers, who end up being the ones chasing Windows compatibility, while Linux developers have to toil hard so the same hardware work seamlessly - binary blobs or not. It often does, impressively enough.

And, after all of that, all you have to do is choose. Pick your distro. Each have their focus, strengths (and weaknesses), principles. All for free, and with a community you can be a part of!...

..and yet, that is somehow a problem. Because those free software dorks dare to have an OPINION, amirite? How dare them?

Some see a problem with free software, I see how some people reward selfishness and greed. It is no wonder the corporations who care the less are the most prosperous - many people reward them not only out of convenience, but also out of principle too.

Give 'em SSPL, says Elastic. No thanks, say critics: 'Doubling down on open' not open at all

AGPL for the win

Well, that's what AGPL is for.

All you hear is that it is a licence that just will not work.

And, funnily enough, out of MURICA with all their MOAR-MONEY corporations, seems that Nextcloud (AGPL licensed) is doing just fine... in Europe of course.

But no, I don't know of any major cloud provider offering it. That is awesome as far as I am concerned. Who the hell need those vampires anyway, other than the massive businesses who can afford the AWSs of the world - and not a penny to the guys coding the tools, ironically?

Let them enjoy each other. Stay out of it.

Two clichés, one headline: 'No good deed goes unpunished' and 'It's always DNS'

Outsourced IT in a nutshell

"While the level of ineptitude on show might, admitted Sam, be hard to believe, "those who have worked in the cesspit of outsourced IT, I'm sure they'll get it!""

Can I get an AMEN?