Posts by bazza

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Oh hang on, wrong company. Perhaps it should be Inspect, Invest, Inhume...

I moved off RedHat 10 years ago. They used to charge a modest fee for their MRG offering, and then they realised it was mostly used by high speed share trading investment companies so they upped the asking price to something like $3,000. Per node. Per year.Ah, bye bye. As all I needed was the "R" bit, we moved to a hybrid of Centos / Scientific Linux (as the names were back then).

Er, SystemD's Future?

This does beg a question though. With CentOS "gone", there's likely a bulk move away to another distro. That'll mean it'll become increasingly hard to find people who "know" the RHEL-style of distribution. So that might in turn diminish interest in outfits willing to pay for RHEL, and that might finish off the company.

Now, if RedHat shut up shop, who the hell takes on the demon spawn SystemD?

Lord knows that if we're to have such a hideous thing such as systemd, there really does need to be a big corporate backer who'll undertake to keep lots of resources focused on it. If dev / bug fixing stops anytime in, say, the next ten years then it's highly likely that there'll still be some catastrophic errors in it, unfound, unfixed.

Support Worth Paying For?

I honestly never saw the point of RedHat's "support". I never once got a good answer out of them, and got the distinct impression all they were doing was thumbing through a set of search results just like I could do myself.

The support from RHEL was no where near the level you had from, say, Sun in the very good old days, where they'd got a ton of detailed technical literature available for literally everything there was to know about their hardware and software. I'm happy to pay for that level of information.

Re: Office 365 is worse than LibreOffice

Agreed.

MS have done a pretty good job of the web versions of MS Office applications, in that their web apps are pretty good in comparison to many other web apps. But they're so far behind the native versions in terms of speed, feature set, usability, etc. I've yet to come across a web app, or Javascript app that doesn't in some way suck; VS Code, another hot'n'trendy example, is simply getting out of hand, bloat-wise.

There's a reason why MS has worked to tie the native app versions into things like OneDrive cloudy solutions; it's the only way to get proper tooling "on the web". Web doesn't cut it. It's easy to see why. A fairly complete MS Office 2013 native installation weighs in at about 926MB of object code (.exe's + .dll's), and about 1.5GB of other stuff. On the assumption that about the same amount of object code would be required if the source were Javascript, a full featured web version of Office is going to be a huge amount of Javascript (many GBytes worth) plus 1.5GB of other resources. That's just not practicable.

Re: Amazon got lucky that Mozilla gave up

I'd prefer if the next language did not hail from the Anglosphere - every language from there (B, BCPL, Bliss, C, C++, perl, go, Swift) has lacked taste. Yet a succession of elegant things from other countries (Pascal, Modula-2, Simula-67, Ada, and probably if I knew them Erlang and OCaml) have sunk almost without trace. I quite like Python - guess what, it's originally from the Netherlands.

C++ is Danish, originally. And the reason why Pascal, Modula-2, Ada etc sank from trace was because they're runtime inefficient for most purposes. Ada is particularly cumbersome to run, and gets used only where there's little choice (safety / mission critical systems, like reactor control or flight control systems). Erlang has had success in telephony networks, an arena where European companies have been strong.

Elegance is all very well and good, but if there's money at stake elegance can be too expensive. Languages like C, C++, etc have an engineering or corporate background. Languages like Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, etc have an academic or committee background. Python was originally conceived as a replacement for a teaching language and, popular though it is, relies messily on C to be fast and has a distribution system that depends on having a compatible build environment for C installed.

The thing is though that modern aircraft with their fancy electronics are, statistically, a whole lot safer than aircraft of old. It's a real triumph of intellectual endeavour.

The thing is that new causes of crashes - e.g. the manufacturer is making some terrible business decisions, or pilot de-skilling, or drunken pilots - is overtaking the old reasons (like weather, getting lost, etc). And the current system for controlling that don't have the appropriate teeth. There's been regulatory capture of the FAA by Boeing, leading to the MAX crashes. A Korean airliner was landed short on a perfecly clear day at San Francisco because the ILS was out of service and the pilots had never landed one by themselves before, a situation that arose despite the airline's training programme being fully legally compliant.

The only way to get that kind of accident rate down is to give the regulators more teeth to force manufactureres and airlines to bear more costs to Do It Properly.

Depends?

I guess it depends. iPhones: yes probably. Macs? Less certain. Monitors, peripheral? Probably not.

Besides none if that matters to the robbers if they can offload it, it'll be the people who buy it who'll find out the hard way. And it won't necessarily be sold off piecemeal in pubs, etc - they're closed at the moment. I'm not sure buying second hand items off eBay is going to be a good idea at the moment.

Re: Not Fit For Purpose

I've since read elsewhere that there is a free replacement program at least for broken vehicles (good), and for a small fee you can turn that into an upgrade to a later version of the ICE system. That seems like a pretty good deal.

Wish the manufacturer of my car offered an ICE system upgrade. With most the only way to get the latest and greatest is to buy a new car...

That's certainly the case. And Intel, in a way, really need AMD to be successful at the moment. ARM is becoming more commonplace, Apple are headed that way, its growing in server land too. Without AMD carrying the x64 torch, there might not be an x64 market to come back to once Intel gets its silicon process sorted out.

Perhaps, but it's easy to imagine that the BBC's traffic is highly predictable. 0700-0900, 1200-1300, 1700-1900, 2100-2300 is my guess.

It also ties them into AWS, so far as I can tell. Politically, helping enrich Amazon at license payer's expense without the option of upping sticks and moving elsewhere could be a bad idea. Especially if it turns out they've done it in a needlessly expensive way.

Re: Extensions are "difficult to write"

Javascript? Aaaarrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh! (reaches for notepad.exe, and the simplistic beauty of unadorned monospaced text).

Re: Smart move

FPGAs have, and have always had, a problem. They're significantly harder to develop for. The point is that, buy the time one's got one's FPGA firmware just right, some new CPU has come along and obliterated any performance advantage that an FPGA ever had, and you may as well have written it in C instead. Especially when one considers that for the price one has to pay for a big FPGA you can get many top end CPUs.

A further complication has been that, historically at least, Xilinx (in particular) weren't above shipping buggy silicon and staying quiet about the bugs until you'd run into them and spent months working out that it wasn't your code at fault. On presenting questions about such bugs to Xilinx, they were in the habit of responding apologetically with a belated errata sheet.

It's hard to make comparisons between FPGAs and CPUs, but these days AMD are putting down 64 cores, wide SIMD vector units, 200GB/s memory bandwidths, very large caches, and 128 lanes of PCIe 4 into their CPUs. These are truly monstrous chips from almost any point of view; extremely parallel, extremely fast, extremely quick to absorb and emit data, extremely clusterable (which simply multitplies up all of those for very little effort), and cheap to acquire. You have to have a very particular type of problem to make an FPGA shine in comparison.

Re: Move to Wayland?

For years people have been complaining that Linux can't match the AV capabilities of Windows, and it looks to me like Wayland is what we need to finally make Linux competitive.

Only a very very few people have been complaining. Wayland isn’t making it competitive because it’s not working, and has broken a lot of stuff. And whatever it is that you mean by making Linux competitive, it’s not going to attract the major games, graphics tools, etc. simply because there’s so many other problems in Linux for the non-Unix admin desktop user. It’s probably better to improve X, trim out some of its dross, improve its security, than to throw it in the bin and make a mess of its replacement.

Re: Don't you...

Yes, JavaScript’s popularity is a dismal state of affairs. Though the figures do also include those using TypeScript, which to MS’s credit does attempt to restore some rationality to that world.

I think that the rise of Web tech for cross platform applications is worrying. There’s some good ones eg VS Code, but even that’s now beginning to be enormously bloated and showing signs of creaking when things get difficult. Web stuff basically sucks, and if something like C# can become properly cross platform (WPF please) then that may end up being the best choice.

Re: claimed that most of the components in the model are open to the public already

Question though - a lager or a proper beer?

Re: You would think

Yep, a prime example where Rust would have caught the mistake. And yes, very embarassing to have a use-after-free vulnerability in this kind of code! Haven't they heard of valgrind?

It's interesting to see who is beginning to talk about Rust in these terms. Microsoft, Linus, even Google a little bit in Fuschia. Apple are probably going to have to follow suit at some point. Security gates that have been Rusted shut are going to become the thing to have.

Re: Mixed Picture

There is a big move to modernise a lot of the banking in view of the Olympic games. It's easy to see that tourists will spend more money if they can more easily get access to their money. The Rugby World Cup was another event driving that, and given how successful that tournament was for Japan from a sporting, tourism, and cultural point of view being well organised for others is a good idea.

At least the Post Offices and 7-Elevens are there. Back in the early 1990s drawing cash on a card was a half hour spent in the bank dealing with three different people and a whole lot of forms. There might even have been an abacus (which is still definitely not an out-of-date way of doing things; they're marvellous).

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

You’re out of date. WSL is now a hyper visor hosting a full Linux kernel with some nice integration features.

MS are merely the latest in a long line of outfits to implement the Linux system interface; first there’s Linux itself, Solaris, FreeBSD, BlackBerry10. It always runs into too many problems of nearly-good-but-not-good-enough.

Re: It is *not* an "HTML5-powered client"...

I wish we could joke about it. Googe is the standards body these days.

Before long we'll probably be looking back to the good ole days of MS dominating...

Back in those days anything going over the USSR was treated as fair game by the USSR. These were considerably more paranoid times.

There were no commercial air routes over Warsaw Pact countries at all for Western aircraft, which made getting to Japan from Europe a very long flight indeed.

It’s interesting to see how it works these days. Russia hasn’t signed up to the freedom of navigation treaties. This means individual airlines have to negotiate directly with the Russian government for permission to fly over Russian territory. And they charge a lot of money. They make a lot of profit from flights between Europe and the Far East.

Nowadays incompetency seems to be a major contributor to airliner shoot downs.

Re: Cheese

For, "but that doesn’t mean they can tolerate it", please read "but that doesn’t mean they can't tolerate it". Ruddy autocorrect...

Re: Entirely predicatble (and predicted):

It’s the same in programming languages and software development. I’ve been around long enough now for Tony Hoare’s CSP to have been fashionable twice. Google’s Protocol Buffers is simply a reinvention of things like ASN.1, minus the sophistication. Where once we used makefiles, we now have the equally messy cmake, IDEs having been and gone. JavaScript is worse than BASIC. Web technologies deliver worse results than XServer. About the only proper innovation is Rust, which really does deserve plaudits for having taken the lid off the question, “What is a programming language?”, and answered it properly this time.