Posts by Short Fat Bald Hairy Man

'Key kernel maintainers' still back Rust in the Linux kernel, despite the doubters

Not ending well, like most things these days

Unrelated but related, I recall when java was considered to be the be all and end all of write once run anywhere and more. Look how well that turned out.

MongoDB takes a swing at PostgreSQL after claiming wins against rival

Regrets

The company I, uh, work for uses mongodb. Choice made before I joined, I hasten to add.

Bitter regrets. Absolutely not worth it, for us, anyway.

Meta digs deep to strike geothermal power deal for its US datacenters

Deep Geothermal

Yellowstones in our backyards?

CockroachDB scurries off to proprietary software land

Yes

Absolutely.

No company owned product

I have kept to a (thumb) rule of not using free/open/libre software owned by a (for profit) company. They will want to monetise it more and more. That is the nature of the beast. And if they have VC funding, just give up.

So Postgresql over even MariaDB, NOT based off technical but other considerations. Technical considerations come second.

Oracle Java license teams set to begin targeting Oracle users who don't think they use Oracle

Re: Simple solution

Used to work with a company using Apache Cassandra. Had to walk around checking whether the developers used anything else than openJDK. Quite a few had. They giggled.

LLMs appear to reason by analogy, a cornerstone of human thinking

Re: Not clear cut

>>>> Did none of them additionally ask the model to explain how it reached its conclusions?

This!!!

And much much more which I cannot even think of, I am sure.

H-1B fraud consultancies grow, with application abuse openly discussed online

Re: What a Sad Mess

Yup, I remember when I held one at the end of the previous millennium.

Me with whatever advanced degree I had, at the consulate, with pretty much the rest barely out of college.

Was left wondering did the USA not have ANYONE technically qualified.

And there was another company near my US office which I suspect did only this. Body shopping I think we called it. Always used to see fellow countrymen in groups of 4 (always 4 and always men). From what I could see, from a particular state.

Now a days, I read it is openly done.

https://infotechlead.com/bpo/walt-disney-sacks-250-and-asks-them-to-train-indians-as-replacement-30761

Fed up with Python setup and packaging? Try a shot of Rye

Re: No mention of pip and venv?

For me, they have worked with different versions too (ubuntu with deadsnakes ppa).

Right now, I have 3.9 (for legacy), 3.10 (default OS) and 3.11 (always test on one ahead) right now. Seem to work ok.

China discovers unknown mineral on the moon, names it Changesite-(Y)

Re: Helium-3 vs. Helium-4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vRM7Ucc8Q8

Deepin prepares to leave Debian base and move to fully independent distro

Re: Welcome disruption

Unfortunately, that is tricky. For example, I use Ubuntu and that has moved some browsers (chromium? and firefox since 22.04?) to snap. And some other (I forget which) stuff is also snap only.

Re: Welcome disruption

Yes, I believe that is true. For that reason (and others), trying to make a *BSD my main OS of use, but lethargy.

AI-friendly patent law needed 'as a matter of national security', ex-USPTO boss says

Yes.

Have a million of these. Or more.

India's big four services giants bemoan rising labor costs

Re: "Lateral hiring"

Need two icons, beer and keyboard.

Rejoice! System Administrator Appreciation Day (SAAD) is nigh

Re: Asprin

Dare I suggest that an even more practical gift would be a real doll?

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Re: error in scheduler or... PEBKAC

Exactly what I thought!

This company is an inverted Monty Python what have the Romans ever done for us,

Intuit pulls QuickBooks from India, uncomfortably quickly

Lobbying?

Whatever else, the current status of the IT filing in India is that most can file easily online AND the official website is not that bad. Even though there was unnecessary chaos last year.

And exiting in Jan!!!! Every dog knows that the financial year ending is 31 March! Real good! And companies can file (I think) till end October. So they do need to use it till then?

Also have CAs and plain As (!) who will do it (and do it well, and, uh, I am told, help you!) for a modest fee. Need to compete with that too.

And this? Is this correct? (I know, old link)

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-spend-millions-lobbying-us-keep-doing-n736386

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

Re: Knocked out a lot of stock market research sites...

Lovely

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Re: Boats

The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

From The threats to computing science, Dijkstra. 1984

I think this is still valid.

Oracle plans US database for electronic health records

Re: Three words

Absolutely.

But would it not be possible for them to hire lobbyists to help pass accommodating rules?

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

Re: Desktop Linux in Workplaces

I use my desktop for Home and Office - company is very comfortable about me using my personal desktop for office use.

Write product specifications for the company product.

Develop (try to, anyway) trading strategies for financial markets using pandas and co,

Last time I used Windows was in 2003 (Win95 + Excel in a 2GB qemu).

And, the company I am with issues only Linux (Ubuntu) laptops. We noted roughly a 100 USD difference (a while ago) between equivalent hardware laptops with / without Windows, which for us is quite a bit.

Global tech industry objects to India’s new infosec reporting regime

Re: Flood

Yes.

Unity and Trinity: New releases for forks of abandoned Linux desktops

Re: Am I old?

Had me confused for a while too! Trinity and UI? Really?

And step by step hardening. Please! Have been looking for that Just.All.The.Time. Sadly, I cannot as am totally incompetent.

Database company Cockroach Labs more than doubles in value to $5bn

But, but, their slogan is

Scale fast. Survive disaster. Thrive everywhere.

Renting IT hardware on a subscription basis is bad for customers

Re: I wrote the article

Not really.

From what I understand, this is suggesting using 2 (or more!) ISPs, one main and one backup.

More reduces your performance risk -- but increases expenses, of course.

Apple's Pegasus lawsuit a 'declaration of war' against offensive software developers, says Kaspersky director

Shakespeare has it

A plague o’ both your houses

Indian securities depository exposed 44 million investors' personal info – twice

Expected behaviour

Like this is a fucking surprise.

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

Re: A plan for Red Hat...

If that happens happy days will be here again!

Microsoft introduces Azure Container Apps with scale to zero

Re: This is what scares me

I have NO IDEA what all this is about and I been using various Linux/BSD flavours since the mid 1990s.

BUT, I have colleagues who were most likely born mid 1990s use it nonchalantly. I listen in, terrified. When is that ball they are throwing around going to explode? Do they not realise that it is a fucking hand grenade. With pin off?

Security? They have heard of it.

Judge tosses NEC's claim that Oracle salespeople tricked it into using the wrong software license prior to audit

Not a surprise.

The reason I decided to stay away from all things this company is the completely sadistic bundling of non free components with free components.

Confusing (small company, me) to actually read the licence and try to figure out which part we could use and which we could not.

Just stay away if possible.

Legacy? Good luck!

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

Jesus

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

Some people do, unfortunately.

I do use my printer for printing documents I have to study. Reading on a terminal/e reader does not work when you make(well, I make!) copious notes. And, these WFH days, going to the office is verboten.

That said, I do have a separate printer and scanner (just pure luck!) and am very happy with both, as of now.

Suspect I was lucky

When I needed a printer I did not need a scanner and when I needed a scanner I already had a printer. So, separate, and, until now, happy.

Takes up more space, though.

But, reading this and other horror stories, if I need to replace these, will again buy separately. Unless they stop manufacturing them separately.

Amazon India accused of copying merchant products and juicing search results to sell its own knockoffs

Re: Why buy?

I suspect we live in different countries.

I have quite a few local shops (5 minutes walk maximum, very convenient). Who do have a lot of customers.

Why buy?

Why would anyone buy from here?

I buy here only as a last resort. Either when not available anywhere else or the price differential is way too much. Rarely does that happen.

I go local shops -> town centre shops -> local sellers online -> then here

I have not seen expenses go up significantly due to my policy. And local sellers online seem to give almost all that I cannot find in the shops.

User locked out of Microsoft account by MFA bug, complains of customer-hostile support

Agreed!

Not so early on, I generalised these a bit to

1. No Microsoft

2. No Oracle

Until now, have not had cause to regret those choices. Now, if only I could get rid of the others!

What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

Re: Internet-2021

Something for nothing.

tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

Re: I thought that the merge started taking place in 1939....

Surely you mean Warschau and Berlin?

Re: Wow, just wow

Exactly! The library is supposed to handle this. Now, no more.

Date time programming is hell. This has just made it more hellish for that "some" set of programmers. If you want to deal with Oslo pre 1970s dates and time, cannot use this.

And, as far as I can see, it is not even an actual problem, really!

Wow, just wow

So we lose information? Brilliant. Is this how civilisations decline?

Indian state cuts off internet for millions to stop cheating in exams

Re: Takes me down memory lane, this.

The one mentioned in this news, of course.

As I mentioned, I can see the utility in doing this, insane methods for insane regulations.

Not done for (almost!) any other exam in my experience.

Takes me down memory lane, this.

Seventh standard (grade in many other countries?) final exams.

District level exams, so exams were not in the school I was studying. New place.

First exam, everybody sitting cross legged on the floor (hey, not as bad as you think!), and I started writing. Quite a few not.

15 minutes into the exam, the exam supervisor makes us sit in a huge circle around him.

He takes out a few sheets and dictates around 45% of the paper to us. We were allowed to do the rest by ourselves.

Why 45%? The most basic government job those days required a Seventh Standard certificate.

35% was the passing criterion.

No internet required. Not that it existed. The only way to stop this was to have unqualified supervisors.

Not that I would stop it, knowing why it was done. For quite a few it meant a job or no job.

If memory has not failed me, ALL papers were conducted in this format.

Oracle sets its own JDK free, sort of, for a while

Avoid it like the plague

I try to avoid anything which has even a faint odour of this company,

Luckily for me, I have not worked in environments where I had to adjust.

Wikipedia bans seven Chinese users amid concerns of 'infiltration, physical harm'

Wikipedia does have many problems.

This one made me think a bit.

https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/

I do know, in theory, that Wikipedia is not accurate, but this is outright dangerous. I definitely would have believed it.

By its very structure, Wikipedia is always going to be susceptible to attacks. I have seen amateurish attempts which can hopefully be recognised easily, but these are difficult.

Just a very bad place to be in.

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Ah, a first time user

At college, I once offered to type out an exam paper for a friend. First time I was using a wordprocessor (Wordstar, if you care abiout such things).

After a while, my friend came up to see what was taking so much time, and then burst out laughing.

Accustomed to typewriters, I was carefully formatting each line and pressing a hard return every time I thought one was required.

Things did speed up after that and a year later managed to type out my thesis using Wordstar + 6 floppies (backups!) in no time at all.

We spoke to a Stanford prof on the tech and social impact of AI's powerful, emerging 'foundation models'

Re: Who decides?

Looking at the Tinnit Gebru case, will anybody be allowed to do it? Not within the companies.

And outside will be even trickier I think.

Looks like the highway to hell.

Facebook, academics think they've cracked spotting deepfakes by spotting how they're generated

Looks like Kafka (the author)?

What is the false positive rate? I do not see any reference to that?

If this is used, will those poor bastards be eternally fucked trying to prove that their photo/image/whatever is genuine?

Debian's Cinnamon desktop maintainer quits because he thinks KDE is better now

Re: Legal issues

Exactly what I was referring to, thanks!

IANAL, but I think this latest restriction means not everybody can use QT in its most stable and long lasting form for developing FOSS?

Even if I am wrong, I think it creates an uncertainty in the mind.

This is an ongoing saga since the late 1990s. I recall GNOME starting because of the QT problem.

Legal issues

I stopped using DEs a long while ago, use icewm. But KDE was always a problem, with the QT legal changes.

As far as I am concerned, technical quality comes second, if there are legal problems. Bitten way too many times (long ago!).

And from what I read, they (QT owners) have made worrying changes again.

ASUS baffles customer by telling them thermal pad thickness is proprietary

At this point I wonder exactly which provider makes sense

I do try to base my decision on attitude towards customers.

All my smartphones (both) have been ASUS, Having a rethink when the current one collapses. But I doubt whether there is much choice.

One company whose attitude never came into the picture was Nokia, used their tank until I was forced to use a smartphone.

Used it for nine years, had exactly one LOCAL SHOP REPAIRABLE problem.