* Posts by PushF12

119 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Feb 2008

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Open source turns 20 years old, looks to attract normal people

PushF12

"it was mostly white guys."

Tim Burke is a racist that disparages the people that built the OSS ecosystem.

It is okay to be white.

No parcel drones. No robo-trucks – Teamsters driver union delivers its demands to UPS

PushF12

Blockbuster

Does UPS own any of the new drone technology?

If not, then UPS will leave a bigger crater than companies like Blockbuster Video.

Teamsters will just make the explosion more fun to watch.

Women reboot gender discrimination lawsuit against Google

PushF12

The Pence Rule

Don't hire unqualified women. Get sued. Pay out thousands.

Do diversity hiring instead. Get sued anyways. Pay out millions.

Some 'security people are f*cking morons' says Linus Torvalds

PushF12

Build statues in honor of Linus

Google hires more for politics than ability now, and it is starting to show.

We should be building statutes in tribute to Linus.

Take off, ya hosers! Silicon Valley court says Google can safely ignore Canadian search ban

PushF12

Realpolitiks

The US has the soft touch of the CIA and the hard punch of their carrier battle groups.

Prejudiced humans = prejudiced algorithms, and it's not an easy fix

PushF12
Big Brother

Orwellian redefinition of "predjudice"

The SJWs are commanding us to adulterate statistical reports and tilt risk analysis models to benefit people that don't deserve it and haven't earned it.

Raising minimum wage will raise something else: An army of robots taking away folks' jobs

PushF12

Re: So what jobs can't be automated?

Most decisions for low value financial products are already fully automated. Insurance, credit cards, ULOCs, etc.

And in North America, kiosk banking is a big success. Bank branch are closing everywhere.

The executives at the top are, however, keeping their jobs amidst sweeping RIFs. In this respect, banking is the same as all other sectors.

Windows Subsystem for Linux is coming to Windows Server

PushF12
Windows

PowerShell tab completion

Let me add:

8) Tab completion is useless because things like get-* match a hundred commands.

The verb-noun convention in PowerShell is perfectly backwards because the least significant part of the command name is always the prefix. (ie: It is a little-endian shell.)

Cops harpoon two dark net whales in megabust: AlphaBay and Hansa

PushF12
Boffin

Layers of security

Most of the known Tor busts involved a combination of Firefox bug and social engineering. (eg: The target ignored the download warning to watch a tempting porn file that caused the media player to phone home.)

Anybody doing enough business through Tor (or Bitcoin) to be noticed by the establishment should at least have a dedicated client computer and the wherewithal to piggyback on a public Internet connection.

Per usual, laziness and lack of discipline gets people busted.

Multi-gig broadband spec passes interop test at Verizon

PushF12
Facepalm

ATM reincarnated

So, they care about traffic shaping, zero rating, and piggybacking cellphone traffic into residential DTEs.

Anything for the punters that will actually be buying the service?

Open-source world resurrects Oracle-free Solaris project OmniOS

PushF12
Flame

Re: YAWN

Wow, many down-votes for a plain statement of fact.

The Illumos family is exemplar of platform fragmentation, and suffers from the same community defects as the BSD family.

Solaris lost the primary distinguishing part of its value-prop when Linux got ZFS. Linux already had alternatives for everything else in Solaris, like better raw performance, Crossbow networking, Zones paravirtualization, etc.

Set your alarms for 2.40am UTC – so you can watch Unix time hit 1,500,000,000

PushF12
Windows

Perl? Yuck

$ date -d @1500000000

Walmart tells developers to stay away from AWS

PushF12
Holmes

Walmart understands the basics

Most executives couldn't tell you why Walmart is doing the right thing here. Seriously.

Be our Guetzli, says Google, to make beastly JPEGs beautifully small

PushF12
Pint

Google Photos

Will they be using this codec to recode Google Photo libraries?

Props to Google for doing this kind of hard computer science.

IBM staff petition for right not to work on Trump's pet projects

PushF12
Flame

Perhaps this is astroturfing in anticipation of Trump's promised crackdown on illegal H1 labor.

These people are hopelessly cucked if it is somehow an honest letter.

Netflix and fill – our coffers: Canada mulls taxing vid streaming giant 5% of subs cash

PushF12
Flame

Re: Fucking Politicians

This is worse than a tax because it targets only one business to feed some economic parasites.

This tariff is indistinguishable from protection money for a mobster.

Amazon AWS: 'Hi there!' VMware: 'We submit. Please, save us'

PushF12
Windows

Are all the big cloud migrations complete?

The press release makes it sound like VMware is trying to get some short-term revenue in a space where they failed to compete from customers that still have brand loyalty.

This partnership is dangerous because Amazon watches everything that happens on their platforms; they are known to make moves on valuable things that are hosted by AWS.

Virtualization technology is mature and the particular flavor of it hasn't mattered for a few years, especially since containerization. I wonder how long VMware will be able to keep premium pricing vice the built-in solutions of Linux and Windows.

HDMI hooks up with USB-C in cables that reverse, one way

PushF12
Gimp

Re: If you're worried about an evil device disguised as a charger,

Remember these commercials? https://youtu.be/v3AucZOsjZ4

After the frustrating mess of early USB, this Intel advertising campaign seemed tone deaf.

At a minimum, USB 1.0 needed standard mandatory device profiles for the things that regular users connected to a COM or LPT port in the early 1990s. Modem, printer, and disk were all notably lacking.

Intel's latest diversity report shows numbers at a standstill

PushF12

Re: They dont exist

By preferring inflated (and sometimes totally bogus) foreign credentials, your employer contributed to the problem.

Take a chance on an American. Import labor won't be contributing to your social security or the society that your children will be living in.

Canadian govt to cloud providers: Want our business? Stay local, eh

PushF12
Unhappy

Re: carry through

TLDR: The tax rates that you quote for Canada are dishonest and inaccurate.

Canada has additional tax burdens that never appear in such napkin calculations because they are disguised as mandatory service fees or are otherwise intentionally hidden. (eg: Fuel prices double when you cross the border from New York to Ontario, where it is effectively illegal to break out taxes as separate line items on fuel receipts. The provincial legislature made it illegal to break out the new carbon tax on electricity bills just this week.)

Regulatory capture, official graft, and payroll overheads are rampant problems for small businesses. Canada has nothing comparable to the American S-Corp or "at will" employer protections, and bureaucrats unapologetically pick winners through affirmative action programs. Americans at least pretend that their affirmative action programs are fair or compensatory.

Pertinent to the story, infrastructure providers like Bell Canada make AT&T seem inexpensive and competent. Front Street is pretty much the only data center on the east side of the country that is open to the public and that would be recognized by foreigners as enterprise class.

Router hackers reach for the fork: LEDE splits from OpenWRT

PushF12
Headmaster

git pull requests

OpenWrt uses an archaic listserv and goofy patch management system that excludes GMail and Outlook users, and they are snotty about new contributions

LEDE will prevail if they accept regular git pull requests and do some basic community management.

Google yanks Chrome support for Windows XP, at long last

PushF12
Windows

Performance on XP was already unusably poor...

Chrome relies on hardware acceleration for a good user experience, but many drivers and interfaces for Windows XP are internally blacklisted. (eg: Every WHQL-signed driver ever published by Intel for logo hardware of the XP and Vista eras.)

Google is quick to drop offerings that still work well and that people actually use, so there must have been some other important reason to force XP build discipline onto the Chrome team.

The future of Firefox is … Chrome

PushF12
Stop

Re: The Nokiazation of Mozilla

Mozilla might already be dead, and this news is just an early public report of its decomposition.

Just like how RIM died a few years ago, but the BlackBerry brand was grafted onto an Android product only recently.

Riddle me this: What grows as it shrinks? Answer: LTO tape

PushF12
Paris Hilton

"Compressed" capacity shipped?

Copypasta from the LTO marketing wonk makes Paris Hilton sad.

Lost in the obits: Intel's Andy Grove's great warning to Silicon Valley

PushF12
Childcatcher

And zero lobbying was done

Groves recognized this economy-destroying problem, but did nothing to fix it despite being in a unique position to do so.

Quite the opposite indeed. Intel became an enthusiastic part of the corporatist government complex that created it.

Canonical accused of violating GPL with ZFS-in-Ubuntu 16.04 plan

PushF12
Headmaster

Oracle/Canonical licensing deal

Has nobody here ever done business with Oracle or Canonical?

An exclusive licensing deal for ZFS was probably signed a year ago.

Criminal records checks 'unlawful' and 'arbitrary' rules High Court

PushF12
Childcatcher

Re: Conceal minor offenses after 10 years

The Canadian system is subverted by private HR services that keep permanent copies of those records.

Any public accusation is enough to disenfranchise a person, but your landlord might not know about, or be able to afford, access to these databases.

Americans have a similar problem with automated matching of arrest booking photographs. Police contact records are forever.

Mozilla confirms its Firefox OS phones are dead

PushF12
Thumb Up

Re: Allow the apps to run in both mobile and desktop

If the early Netscape browsers had a client-side certificate feature, then the web today might be a place with single sign on.

When the feature did appear, the already established certificate vendors tried to monetize it, which caused early adopters to reject it. Generating another username and password pair are zero cost.

IETF's older white men urged to tone it down

PushF12
Big Brother

Who is John Galt?

Smart productive characters arguing rudely about systems architecture could be a modern reboot of the Fountainhead.

Ayn Rand predicted this behavior and its consequences. Her writing gives many people the same bad aftertaste as the Idiocracy movie, but she wasn't wrong.

Eric S Raymond proposes a solution in his recent essay entitled "Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs".

VMware lawsuit fallout causes funding issues for GPL lobby group

PushF12
Holmes

Re: Please help Conservancy !

Was this consequence really a surprise?

Corporations don't donate, they only invest, and thus expect a quid pro quo for all lobbying money.

Windows 10 is an antique (and you might be too) says Google man

PushF12
Boffin

LTSB

The LTSB builds of Windows 10 don't have metro/tifkam apps, and regular users aren't able to (easily) install them.

Microsoft responded to the complaining and stripped it all out. It feels like a service pack on Windows 7.

Dunno why LTSB hasn't gotten more attention. Works great on netbooks and embedded-ish hardware, short of the enterprise licensing.

Intel workforce diversity report throws up a bunch of 'unknowns'

PushF12
Childcatcher

Re: Wonder how much longer this will be a problem

The 35-45 age range for sunsetting white men is more written policy than a secret. (It would be fair to include asian males in this discussion, but the western world cares about them even less.)

The diversity output of schools is still too low to satisfy strategic goals, so in addition to hiring discrimination, the ratios are being forcibly changed by terminations and selective layoffs.

Actively warning youngsters that STEM fields are poisoned is the only decent thing to do. Any student smart enough to be competent in STEM can succeed in a regulated trade or protected profession. Remind their parents how "worker shortage" stories coming through the TV are paid content.

Ubuntu phone on sale to world+dog ... but will it work on your network?

PushF12
Unhappy

Ubuntu Phone is already dead in North America

No-contract carriers in North America often use the AWS radio bands, which means that Ubuntu Phone is incompatible with networks that are used by people in North America that can take a risk on a new product.

Everybody else is in a 2-year hardware subsidy contract, where costs effectively increase by 20% while using a non-carrier phone.

Lights out for Ada Initiative – women's group closing shop

PushF12
Holmes

Re: Unfortunately doomed to fail

> How is it that the medical profession managed to transition well, but others have not?

Medicine is tightly regulated. The professional colleges control labor supply and enforce quota according to social policy.

STEM education was changed in the 1990s to accommodate and encourage female students, but the effort is wasted by a structural oversupply of labor.

> Perhaps engineering needs to look at what they did.

Form a strong professional association that self-regulates in ways to ensure that an engineering job is comfortable and lucrative for an entire career?

A doctor's income only goes up with age and experience. The salary of an average STEM worker peaks within five years, and the harder disciplines have a career half-life of less than fifteen years.

Intel TOCK BLOCK: 10nm Cannonlake delayed to 2017, bonus 14nm Kaby Lake to '16

PushF12
Boffin

Re: Patterning, overlay and EUV

Somebody at El Reg should apply some editing grease to this comment and post it as guest article.

PushF12
Holmes

AMD tripped and fell

Intel is taking an engineering breather, and might take higher margins, because AMD lost its CPU roadmap and is withdrawing from the PC market.

Expect schedules to slide until 64-bit ARM alternatives begin eating into Intel's server market revenues (or they feel some other competitive pressure).

Rackspace to resell and support Microsoft's Azure

PushF12
Terminator

Microsoft doesn't have partners, it has victims

Microsoft drains Rackspace customers into Azure, rewards a few Rackspace executives with sinecure, and lets the husk of another 'partner' wither on the midden.

Logitech is my favorite example this kind of victimization. History and experience suggests that affected Rackspace personnel have a few years to find alternate employment.

Only IT departments want hybrid cloud solutions because it keeps some of their function internal and because they usually understand outsourcing risks. All other stakeholders in large corporations want the near-term capital, cost, and staff reductions that complete externalization brings.

Cloud storage is a three-way race with no contenders

PushF12
Meh

Re: Competition

Today $60/year buys a terabyte of consumer storage from the big vendors, plus Amazon and Microsoft are already offering 'unlimited' subscriptions in some markets. Consumers will expect new competition to enter at this price point.

The smaller players are still alive, but an oligopoly is discernible. Computing businesses are now more about capitalization and less about technology.

The consolidation will be good for buyers in the coming decade, but very bad for all other commercial stakeholders.

Oi! 'Hands off America's Wi-Fi spectrum' yells, er, the cable lobby

PushF12
Alien

Because it overlaps with cable deployment plans.

The landline monopolies only care about this because they paid the FCC for short-haul wireless privileges and don't want competing LTE solutions to get a free ride or be competitively inexpensive.

The American Baby Bells (and their cousin Bell Canada) intend to replace rotting copper infrastructure with short-haul wireless. AT&T is already advertising the next phase of their U-Verse Wireless program in test markets.

FCC recently decided that 911 requirements on POTS will be derated to let this happen, which was a major regulatory milestone. Legacy customers may be forced off their landline the next time it breaks if LTE short-haul is available.

git commit -m 'Add $200m to GitHub, tweak valuation to $2bn'

PushF12
Flame

Re: Devs, prepare to abandon ship.

Become? Github is already exercising editorial control over content and recently deployed a DMCA robot to make takedowns easier.

People unfortunate enough offend SJWs or be noticed by the politburo also risk bannination or public humiliation. Github is a safe place.

The debacle of io.js forking from node.js is an example that El Reg covered.

It's 2015 and hackers can hijack your Windows PC if you watch a web video

PushF12
Alert

POSReady 2009 got these security updates

Windows XP editions that are still supported got the Internet Explorer, Windows Media, and KMD patches.

This means that Windows XP editions for consumers are now wide open to exploit by script kiddies. If they can connect to an affected computer or phish it in any way, then they can pwn it.

Microsoft makes Skype beach body ready with web browser beta release

PushF12
Alien

Microsoft supports Linux better than Google

Skype for Linux is top-notch for closed proprietary software. In a bizzaro twist, Microsoft is starting to provide better applications for Linux than Google.

Google put their choice GChat, GTalk, and GVoice products into a blender and got the pink slime named Hangouts.

Sysadmins rebel over GUI-free install for Windows Server 2016

PushF12
Terminator

Fear, angst, and a reminder of Novell

Windows Server 2016 deprecates the Desktop/GUI as a core system component. Microsoft is fully committed to a future in cloud computing (and IoT), and its reduced interest in the SMB space is starting to show.

Totally expected, but it will upset people that are inattentive, stuck in the SMB space, or just too tired to retread themselves for yet another run on the carousel of IT employment.

The squawks of indignation and dismay coming from small IT departments today sound much like they did twenty years ago when the Novell platform was in decline. PowerShell is a new shibboleth.

Google to axe TXT reminders for Calendar events

PushF12
Unhappy

I still miss GOOG-411

Google is large enough to have peering agreements with all major carriers, which means they pay nearly zero for SMS. The electricity to run the servers and networks costs more.

The undertaker is just digging a new hole in the Google Product Graveyard.

Your metadata and the cost of collecting it belong on your phone and internet bill

PushF12
Thumb Up

A Good Thing, despite the politics

"The tactic certainly helped to make the tax a stinker and therefore contributed to the last Federal government's electoral demise."

Transparency is always a good thing and should happen more often because it keeps people aware and interested. It reminds people that they are being used like, well, taxpayers.

In some American jurisdictions, things like "garbage pickup", "public library services", and "road painting" appear as line items on municipal tax statements. An electric bill might have ten such things showing where the money goes.

Foxconn joins the Cyanogen investment party

PushF12

Google in crisis

If the Foxconn (or Samsung) consortium use it in just one product family, then CyanogenMod could easily become larger than WinPhone.

Just a tease that this might happen was enough to attract venture capital. This is the opportunity that the Canonical Ubuntu Phone was hoping to get.

The bigger issue is that Google is having a design, quality, and leadership crisis involving Android that is motivating partners (and Microsoft) to fork the platform.

Microsoft adds Azure VM controls to Virtual Machine Manager

PushF12
Meh

> When will that occur? What will the revenue fallout of that look like?

The revenue fallout already looks like the PC market implosion, except that Microsoft is large and diverse enough to slosh the books around so that it isn't obvious. Intel already restructured their accounting in the same way to mask underperforming divisions.

More than 30% of all ODM output is purchased by the large cloud vendors. Anybody still doing premise installations is a small customer in comparison.

> But the existing strategy of herding customers towards the cloud had led to some pretty bitter alienation and it is starting to show in revenue.

You have this backwards. Customers stampeded toward the cloud and left Microsoft standing in the field.

SAN upstart Coraid AXING staff, struggling to survive – sources

PushF12

CoRaid abandoned engineering before SATA was a thing

The first CoRaid product was a physical ATA-to-Ethernet bridge that connected a cheap commodity disk to a 10Mbps ethernet port. The idea was that a good ethernet switch could be used to build a middling SAN that would cost at least 90% less than any solution involving Fiber Channel.

Back when disks had ribbon cables and companies had dedicated storage teams, our SAN Department was upset because the CoRaid solution was both excellent and disruptively inexpensive. At the time, the notion that ethernet technology could eclipse either SCSI performance or FC fabrics was novel.

After getting their AoE driver into the Linux kernel, near the time when libata was superseding libide, CoRaid pivoted into the software defined storage market. They probably did this to get an easier margin, but this space was soon overrun by OpenZFS appliances.

Afterwards, CoRaid lacked a differentiator because the AoE hardware was never updated for SATA, and because ZFS+iSCSI performance caught up through things like multi-core CPUs and offload engines on mid-range ethernet adapters.

CoRaid is a business study in how one good idea can carry a company for more than a decade through more than $100M in investment despite mediocre executive management.

BlackBerry Enterprise chief: Yes, we did leave users behind

PushF12
Boffin

Re: They're still in deep trouble

Blackberry/RIM opens their infrastructure to spooks when pressure is applied. Most recently to the government of India, but the leaks suggest that backend access is available to every established interest that cares to have it.

Secure telephone networks do not exist for the regular end-user, so this isn't something that Blackberry/RIM can sell to people that actually care about security.

The sales pitch about having a "global network" can be translated into analyst-speak as "Blackberry/RIM is a legacy hosted services provider unsuccessfully trying to leverage obsolete capital assets in a decentralized service market".

systemd row ends with Debian getting forked

PushF12

Re: Kids! Kids!

Good point. Red Hat wants to bundle ZFS on Linux with RHEL -- and then sell all of the enterprise stuff that runs on ZFS -- and this is one way that they can do it.

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