Posts by Yes Me

Re: ORGasmic

"there’s nothing in [the] recent announcement that addresses the unilateral decision-making that led to the Internet Society (ISOC) board of directors deciding in secrecy over a matter of weeks to sell the .org domain,”

Um, no, why should there be? The Internet Scociety (which anybody can join -- anybody) has a Board (selected by a well documented community process) and the Board gets to decide on things. And from the first announcement, they made it clear that the confidentiality was not their choice; the company offering to buy insisted on confidentiality, which is pretty normal in any $B deal that doesn't involve stock trading.

Where you detect hypocrisy is beyond me. ISOC was transparent from day 1 about why they wanted the deal and what they would do with the proceeds.

Apparently the piffle about the sacredness of the .org registry continues. It's a list of names, for heaven's sake. It's nothing other than a list of names. To have control of a name on that list, you have to pay a modest annual fee. That's all there is to it. There's no vetting, and never has been since 1998, whether the "organisation" using a name is good, bad, or indifferent, or even whether it is an organisation at all rather than an individual person or just a robot. The only qualification is the ability to pay the fee. If the EFF forgets to pay its fee one year, eff.org might pop up the next month as a porn site. There's no magic in .org. (www.magic.org shows this quite neatly.)

Re: Couldn't they have waited until the streamlined POWER offerings supported Linux?

If only IBM hadn't handed over decision making to pointy-haired accountants some years ago, they might have been able to notice that dumping Linux-based clients before supporting Linux was not the brightest idea they've had this century.

Come on Arvind Krishna, you know better than this!

Re: Security concerns

Some upper layer software has sucky or non-existent support for IPv6. That isn't IPv6's fault; IPv6 support in network stacks and ISPs is getting better and better. Actually to a large extent it's DoD's fault for not doing what they are very good at: requiring specific support in their RFPs and checking that it's delivered.

Meanwhile in the real world, IPv6 usage is up to 30% according to Google, with a measurable jump caused by COVID-19 (i.e. work-from-home generates IPv6 traffic).

Shareholders really love this...

"Shareholders really love this arrangement though."

Not so much. I sold mine several mass firings ago, when there was a brief upwards tick in the share price. Good move, as it turns out.

Interesting, though, that Arvind is slashing the services arms that his two predecessors were so keen on. That does signal some sort of change. But "pivots to cloud"? Two buzzwords in one phrase, so I have no idea what it really means.

Re: Thank you

So, you rate the probability of significant harm due to GCHQ knowing where you've been as greater than the probability of significant harm due to undetected contact with infectious individuals.

I don't know how to calculate the odds of those two hypothetical outcomes. I do know that COVID-19 is an unpleasant and dangerous disease, and that I have been nowhere that would be of concern to GCHQ. I'll take the tracking, thankyou.

Where the money is

"Uni's have to go where the money is"

Well, duh, that's the neo-liberals' idea of how to run universities. No surprise that they're going to the most successful telecomms & networking company in the most important country in the world.

Why would anyone look to a collapsing economy such as the US for long-term R&D money? And this stupid government has made the EU a much less promising source of funds. You're left with China.

Re: The root cause of this issue started for IBM some years ago.. back in 2010-2012

"About 1994 when an outsider CEO came in who did not understand mainframe business model..."

Wrong. Lou Gerstner saved the company when it was about to choke to death on the mainframe-plus-SNA business model that was already obsoleted by commodity servers and the Internet. Although he did a bit of the share option incentive stuff, and share buy-backs to enhance the bull market, it was the next guy (Sam) who started the ruinous accountant-based "shareholder value" "services-driven" crap that ruined the company, and who also picked another one like him (Ginni) who just kept cranking the same handle. It will be great if Arvind Krishna can correct things, but if not, IBM will join DEC and ICL in Computer Company Heaven.

There are signs that Arvind is doing things right, like stopping the share buy-backs:

https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/04/21/the-next-ibm-platform-revisited/

Paris, because IBM paid for a lot of Hilton nights for me at one point.

Shame on you, Kieren

This decision is a sad triumph of magical thinking over rationality. In so far as Kieren's biased reporting has helped to influence the decision, it isn't a good day for The Register either.

Just to recap: .org has been operated as a commercial registry since 1998, in a highly competitive market where the price of registering a name in a database has been kept pretty low. There has been essentially no vetting of who registers in .org, and it's been used for commercial or malicious purposes as well as for non-commercial organisations (only some of which are non-profits or NGOs). Who owns the company that runs the registry database has no impact on the perceived value of the name.

So blocking this sale is irrational, and will possibly have negative impacts that people will look back on in 20 years with some considerable regret.

Re: government involvement in computer intrusions and attacks

"they don't allow foreign carriers to operate outside of HK."

It's (theoretically) a Communist country, remember? What else do you expect?

The USA is (theoretically) a capitalist country with strong anti-trust laws. That means they should be allowing free competition regardless of ownership of a company.

So, it's the United States of Trump which is the hypocrite here. Just part of the trade war (which they've already lost, by the way).

Re: When did IBM lose its way

You're wrong about Gerstner. Actually it was his predecessor (Akers) who started the mass firings and also planned to split up the company the first time it was swirling towards the plug hole. Gerstner came in, actually listened to the top technical people, decided to cancel any idea of splitting the company, and started the pivot towards the Internet. A bit late, since apparently Akers didn't notice the Internet and was fixated with the dying SNA cash cow (by which I do not mean Ellen Hancock personally, but she was quickly ejected by Gerstner). Gerstner's one mistake: picking Palmisano to follow him, who mainly listened to accountants and marketroids. Palmisano's worst mistake: picking Rometty. Rometty's best decision: picking Arvind Krishna. I have a tiny hope that he can save the company again.