Posts by HCV

"five vuvuzelas played from inside a lead-lined coffin"

Coincidentally, the name of Guy Ritchie's next movie.

Snap

Oracle would not provide a statement... "in light of the fact this is a global story.”

Be off with you, you Brexiting island dwellers, you!

"Linux kernel developers have gain given Linus Torvalds cause for complaint."

Is this "cheeky" British "slang" (or "chuffing")? Can you translate for those of us "across the lorry"?

Everything old is new again

“Future features and functionality in Solaris will continue to be delivered through dot releases instead of more disruptive major releases.”

“It's likely to be the customers like that who asked for [no Solaris 12]. S11 takeup is steady, but slow, and neither customers nor ISVs will want the disruption of yet another major release yet”

I’ve seen this movie before.

After Solaris 10, word came from the executive suite that Solaris 11 would not be coming out for… a while. Possibly ever. Can’t spend all that money on ISV adoption, customers are ascairt, and so on. Let’s just keep on adding things to Solaris 10.

Customers would hear the “Solaris 10 forevarr” message (aka “continuous non-disruptive delivery”) and say, “that sounds great! So when do we get feature X in Solaris 10?”

“Oh, well…” —kicking of ground with toes ensues— “…that requires feature Y, which would require too much change for a dot-dot release…” (remember, as someone already pointed out, “Solaris 10” is really SunOS 5.10, so “continuous delivery” would come through dot-dot releases.)

Customers in general do not want anything to change, ever… except for, of course, the new things. Can we have all the new things, please? But don’t change anything!

When Oracle took over, they saw what was in Solaris 11 and never coming in Solaris 10, and listened to customers who wanted those things, and said, “ship that sucker.” Which took another almost two years, for a total of almost seven years between 10 and 11 by then.

(Oracle had a novel way of solving the adoption costs, though, by not spending anything on customer or ISV adoption. Which might explain the “takeup is steady, but slow” —after FIVE YEARS— part.)

The good news is that a big reason why “continuous delivery” was a non-starter for Solaris 10 was that all the features needed to make it work at all, most notably IPS, were in Solaris 11. So it will definitely be easier to do this than it was 10 years ago. The questions are how much Oracle is willing to spend on backporting how many features from Solaris 12, and at what point do you start fudging the line between what is and isn’t a dot release?

The rain gage to me, and what I’d be asking as a customer, is, “When do you expect to continuously deliverate zero-downtime patching?” since that is A) on the top of the list of Solaris 12 features they’ve been talking about, and B) something that if it makes it into Solaris 11 would be strong proof that “Continuous Delivery” is doable, even for something requiring what would seem to be major changes to the kernel.

Debunked

I asked my smart meter if there was any credence to any of this. It said, "chill."

Mr. Language Person appreciates you holding the line

Thank you for saying "on-premises" despite EMC's slide saying "on-premise".

One Step Beyond?

"...touting Alpha as a step beyond anything else on the market at the time. It was mostly right: x86-64 didn't arrive until the year 2000."

Er, what? Even if you define "the market" as being "the market for processors desperately hoping to split the 'Wintel' atom", that still isn't true.

Canada Man

Florida thanks you.

Doesn't strike me as a good idea at all

I really don't like it when my web browser tries to outguess reality. If a page is missing, that's data of a sort right there. And instead showing me what is by definition outdated information? No. Don't.

I'm especially not crazy about the potential for a chilling effect. Sites will quickly learn that they can't actually delete a page -- unless they request that it be deleted from the Wayback Machine, too!

I've already seen archived sites get wiped from the IA at the request of a new domain owner. This is going to cause even more disappearances.

Kudos, Kaspersky

It takes a real man to apologize.

I am following their lead

...and returning any and all awards to have been issued for my perpetual motion app, which *WOULD HAVE* provided limitless energy for the world, until you meddling kids went and spoiled it.

"Who nautical miles" are bigger on the inside.

"This appears to be Sun's fault, and now Oracle's fault, because they used a derivative of a well-recognized public license, the MPL, a clear violation of the 'must be literally blessed by a man who appears in public wearing a disk platter on his head under the alter ego of "St. IGNUtius"' doctrine."

Antler heaven? Carry a big stick, Roger. The refrigerator is full

See? I can do this, too!

"premise" is not the same thing as "premises".

"On-premise" -- to the point, germane, appropriate.

"On-premises" -- at your place of business.

Flaunt: to show off, to provoke envy

Flout: to blatantly ignore or disregard

For shame: Asimov's expository style was definitely more Shatner to Clarke's Stewart. The good doctor would have written something like:

"My God!" Quarv Seldnar exclaimed. "The stars! They're all... going *out*!"

Where's the warning label?

TRIG-ER ALERT

Blue Screen of Death, or...

...Orange Screen of Smoke?

I'm a frequent editor, but I don't think of myself as being part of the WP inner, middle or even recognized outer circle.

...and I find the new editor to be pretty awful. First of all, my editing is necessarily of the "get in, get out and move on" style; it's usually because I see something in an article I came to read, and it hurts my eyes. The new editor is slow than sin to fire up.

Second, anyone who edits WP regularly knows what's behind the skin, and I think it would scare us all to death to trust the fragile thing that is the markup to a visual editor of recent origin.

I suspect new/infrequent editors might like it better than having to learn the markup, though.

Here's one thing that made me laugh: if you go to your preferences to turn it off, you'll see that the option isn't something like "use the old editor" -- it's "temporarily disable VE during beta." You LIKE scented air! It's fresh and invigorating! Please stand by while we make it even MORE wonderful! In time, you will learn to love me!