* Posts by BinkyTheMagicPaperclip

1469 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2012

Hyperfluorescent OLEDs promise more efficient displays that won't make you so blue

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Monochrome World

You might be surprised. Did Amstrad ever *really* push the boundaries? Perhaps not, but they built functional systems down to an acceptable price.

Their early PC offerings were seriously competitive, if a little lacking in build quality. The CPC compared well with equivalent 8 bit micros at the time.

Now, for CP/M, it's probably not hyperbole to say they were and are one of the premier providers of affordable systems, although not always intentionally.

The PCW was, and is, the most accessible of CP/M systems. Plenty of memory, high resolution screen, disk drives. Many addons. Lots of native software in addition to the CP/M library. Printer and keyboard quality leave something to be desired but you can't have everything. Go looking for a CP/M system on ebay these days and you're limited to kits (needs add on serial console, keyboard, monitor), older expensive systems, add ons for more conventional home computers[1], and the PCW at the most affordable integrated end.

The NC100 & NC200 filled a very specific niche at the time and were not exactly high powered. Nevertheless they're compact portable Z80 systems that have decent battery life and can be coerced to run CP/M (this does require a reasonable degree of fiddling). The few alternatives in that form factor are Epson's fairly obscure PX-4/8, or older bulky systems such as the Kaypro that require mains power.

[1] Such as the Amstrad CPC 6128, with 128KB RAM, 80 columns, and colour. Also the Amstrad Spectrum +3, but that only had a 51 column screen. Next up in mass market accessibility is likely to be an MSX2 system of some type, a Commodore 128 (slow), or a wide array of either less common systems or more common systems with additional addons to provide 80 columns and a disk drive (often rare and expensive)

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Monochrome World

If that's the same as early monochrome laptops then it's readable, the problem lies when motion is attempted.

I recently tried to use an Amstrad NC200 (early to mid 90s Z80 based sub laptop capable of running CP/M) to connect to a BBS using a serial wifi modem. All was fine until the screen scrolled. Huge amount of blur.

I seem to remember Palm based devices being a bit better but not eliminating this, but I'm too lazy to charge and start one at the moment. They did have the lovely green backlight though.

Windows Format dialog waited decades for UI revamp that never came

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

My memory was that NT 4 *never* supported FAT32. It definitely didn't on release, and I didn't think it ever supported it.

However it did support FAT16 partitions up to 4GB in size, which no other OS did.

Course, in 96 NT4 lacked USB support too, and the USB sticks and flash media that slowly followed definitely needed more than 32GB FAT32 for various devices.

Beijing issues list of approved CPUs – with no Intel or AMD

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Those Chinese Linux distributions are still Linux, right?

Writing an operating system is never a trivial endeavour, but it's only moderately rare rather than truly remarkable.

What's remarkable is not writing an OS, it's gathering the surrounding infrastructure. At the time Linux became vaguely usable for a clued up end user, NetBSD and FreeBSD were close to release, 32 bit OS/2 was out, and Windows NT was also near. NeXTStep was already out, and would be shortly available for i386 - it'd have minimal impact until the turn of the century when Apple adopted it in the form of OS X for their PowerPC systems. BeOS, WebOS and others would also come and go.

It's also true that what was expected from an operating system in 1992 was radically different to that in 2002, or in indeed 2022. In 1992 you could get away with releasing a consumer OS without built in networking! Now, if your operating system doesn't include widevine to play DRM content from streaming providers, most people won't touch it. 3D cards didn't exist in the consumer space in 1992, now they're a necessity just to get Wayland running.

Linus continues to be an excellent shepherd of the product, but did get a large leg up from the existence of GNU and XFree86. Whatever the faults of X, a lot of credit is also due to the large commercial companies that sponsored its development.

Redis tightens its license terms, pleasing basically no one

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

They should drop more projects

It's very debatable whether being paid is a reasonable expectation. Yes, if it's benefiting more people than yourself morally the correct thing to do is contribute money or resource to improve the project. If you're a company, and making money from free labour, you should definitely be contributing. However this is yet another case of 'someone should do the right thing' yet no-one wants to be 'someone'.

It's not particularly different from volunteering in other areas. Volunteering provides benefits to other people, occasionally also to people who make money. It can become equivalent to a job. At some point ultimately if what you're putting in isn't matched by a vaguely equivalent output (which can be being involved in a community, it doesn't have to be in income or products) it's wise to quit. I volunteered long term, it was providing a benefit to other people, but for far too long there was minimal return or consideration for me, so I quit. Should have done it before..

If you're in a situation where people are either taking advantage or providing minimal benefit, get out! You will not be appreciated until people are reminded there is a cost to your services.

Whistleblower raises alarm over UK Nursing and Midwifery Council's DB

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Includes sexual orientation

I feel you're misunderstanding. You're not providing the opportunity to make an offer based on a protected characteristic of the nurse. Whilst there are possible reasons for the NMC to store the information, anyone requesting if the nurse has a valid registration shouldn't be provided with that data.

If the nurses registered doesn't provide a reasonable match to the distribution of the general population, it's worth asking why.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Includes sexual orientation

haha. no comment.

Actually based on friends I know in nursing, and working briefly in the NHS many years ago.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Includes sexual orientation

Leaving aside possible GDPR implications, diversity monitoring. Given the difficulty in recruiting nurses you want to be sure the number of reasons limiting recruits aren't more than the pay and conditions on offer.

Personally I'd be reasonably certain that a comparison of sexual orientation diversity in nurses vs the average population would actually show the numbers of non straight nurses are higher than average, but you don't know how well you're doing if you don't measure it.

UN: E-waste is growing 5x faster than it can be recycled

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Recycling not that easy

Some paranoia is a good idea, salt water is a tad over the top if you're just an average user. By the time you've drilled the device you're into professional data recovery, government security services, or a really really motivated individual territory.

If the data are important enough, it'd probably be far more effective to use a sander on a platter rather than a drill.

If you're saying that your data are in any case fairly worthless, why are you going to this effort? A standard multi phase wipe is more than good enough, and enables the device to be safely used by someone else.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

No, it isn't. It's the average person on the street. Mostly they're quite happy with short mobile phone contracts, and they enjoy New Shiny.

Whilst 'the rich' disproportionately contribute to emissions on planes, there aren't enough of them to affect the market of phones unless you're classing 'rich' as 'the global rich' aka very average people living in non third world countries.

That's the real problem with climate change. To effectively counter it requires substantial change to an average first world lifestyle, and few people are prepared to compromise.

There's a lot that can be pinned on large wealthy companies, and their excessive influence on politics, but not all of it can be blamed on them.

Much easier to blame someone else though, because then you conveniently don't have to do something, or feel guilt for being part of the problem.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

There would still be substantially fewer orders each year if phones could be guaranteed to last 5-10 years, and the whole setup of some companies is based on a short renewal cycle.

Nevertheless, to take climate change and recycling seriously, that impact on companies and supply changes is exactly what should be happening.

UK awards £1.73M to AI projects to advance net zero goals

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Heat Pumps and solar

On their own they work better than nothing, but yes, battery storage is better. The complexity and implications (such as sticking a load of lithium ion in close proximity) is higher though, so I decided that was really the next step after making the panels a reasonable price.

What's the payback on your system, though?

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Actually doesn't sound completely unreasonable

If you read the linked piece a few of the projects are very definitely 'we're mates of someone important, or just very good at writing pitches' given the amounts involved. Some others sound quite reasonable in terms of forecasting, it's all about adding up the smaller wins.

Having said that as usual the government are trying to do this on the cheap, 2M is naff all. They won't do anything serious.

They could (hobby horses ahoy.. clip clop)

Try and mandate mobile phone lifespans or even a (paid - you expect consumers to give their old phones away for free?) recycling scheme to recover precious metals, to prevent so much unnecessary wastage. You don't need a fancy phone every two years.

Subsidise heat pumps and electricity long term. Why are they pushing heat pumps? Lower emissions than gas fired systems.

Why are consumers not going for heat pumps? Because they cost more upfront *AND* on an on-going basis and have lower performance than gas. Recent claims about higher base temperatures in heat pumps (mostly) seem to involve the efficiency reducing, so aren't particularly credible from what I can see. Tell me I'm wrong with actual references, please, my boiler does need replacing in the next few years.

Ahh, but if heat pumps are more expensive to run than gas, this could be offset by low cost solar panels to reduce the energy cost. That'd be a great idea wouldn't it. Hey minister, how about a mass production and subsidised panel offering? Wait, wait, stop running..

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

I'm not sure how you reach that conclusion unless your only criteria is 'it has to be usable as a desktop'.

FreeBSD, I could agree needs more resource. Currently attempting to use FreeBSD to switch away from Windows and boy is there a *gulf* between FreeBSD and either Windows or Linux. Not to mention Firefox breaking in latest ports (and quarterly if I remember), VScode breaking, WINE breaking the 32 bit port on 64 bit platforms (fixed in December). Then, once you run WINE, the API coverage is substantially below that under Linux - which shouldn't be a surprise really, but it's disappointing.

On the bright side ZFS is still great, and bhyve is 'good enough' if still rather bleeding edge and not really average end user turnkey. There's enough functionality and compatibility to achieve most aims and look at it improving in the future.

Illumos - has it ever really hit popularity, I'll give you that one.

NetBSD is the same it has been for a long time. A very slow increase in base functionality, extremely varied per platform support, some gems among a lot of cruft. It's an OS for research, tinkering, and embedded systems, not a general purpose OS unless you enjoy a great deal of pain and are prepared to hack a lot.

OpenBSD is the same, it maintains its focus on security and a userland that is readily accessible from the command line. Provided you fit its use case, it's a pleasure most of the time.

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

What you're missing is that there are legion 'edge cases' of processing data in Excel. Word processors? Presentation programs? There's usually viable alternatives for those.

Excel? Not so much. It's not good at formatting, but gets used for that. It's not good at databases, but gets used for that. It's not even particularly good for writing formulae because it's quite easy to output a sensible sounding (but wrong) result if used incorrectly.

However the alternatives generally require spending more money, take longer, need increased learning, or all three. Additionally, if despite the fact that spreadsheets are fundamentally good at quickly throwing together a compromise solution, Excel does something and Calc does not then Excel is the better package at least for that purpose, and perhaps full stop. It does not matter it could be architected in Python or R, with greater effort (but a better solution) on the user's behalf

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: it tends to screw up the formatting.

A word processor isn't supposed to be a desktop publishing tool, with sophisticated flow and colour control options but it *should* be able to handle basic layout and tables without resorting to a proper DTP package or LaTeX.Maybe Word itself can't do this, but it really isn't unreasonable to expect a word processor should.

I've written some reasonably complex documents in LaTeX including tables, auto routing diagrams, and embedded documents (for PDF output). It's good for free, but as friendly as a cornered rat, with lots (and lots) of edge cases and opaque error messages. *This* addon works here, but not *there* and not with that other addon. If you want to do that, you should use *that* instead, but there's no obvious curated list that says 'do not use this addon except in exceptional circumstances'.

Catch Java 22, available from Oracle for a limited time

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: What's the point?

(and before anyone points it out - yes I know CLion needs (Open) java, and things such as LibreOffice also use Java, or at least they used to). However, my first choice these days would either be Python or .NET/Mono for pretty much everything from web development to scripting. If I had to do cross platform desktop client development, I doubt I'd look at Java first, but (Open) JDK would be on the list.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

What's the point?

You could buy the Oracle JVM based on the open source code, and pay $180 for each and every employee, every year

orrrrr you could pay *nothing* and use the open source version, that everyone else will be using. Certainly the (fairly large) company I work for stripped Java from practically all systems as the licencing cost was significant. Am I missing something amazing ('support' ?) about the Oracle release?

On a vaguely related point I looked at CLion recently, which is also 'subscription based', but if a year's subscription is purchased you retain a 'perpetual fallback licence'. That's the way to do it.

Haven't used Java for years. When it came out it was useful, and cross platform. Used it in Jython, a few Java only programs, created a moderately complex Java object called by Coldfusion. The Enterprise APIs were interesting, if a bit slow.

Now there's a lot more cross platform frameworks, web development options, Python, Powershell, and others.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

For *the consumer* there is little point even bothering with enterprise solutions for perceived reliability or speed. For specific applications there will always be a reason for SLC, and DOMs are definitely useful in embedded systems.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Depends what capacity you need. As the capacities rise, particularly in spinning rust, the disparity becomes pretty small to non existent.

Most people should be using SSDs though, and there's little point in enterprise solutions there.

SAP accused of age discrimination, retaliation by US whistleblower

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Demeaning?

If I unlock my front door and stick a sign on it that says 'front door broken, do not steal anything' and you walk in and steal something, I presume you'd also claim that it's unfair if there's police round the corner?

I do agree that whistle blowing often does not work out well, but suing for discrimination is hardly bad faith, when the obvious way to avoid this 'trap' is to act ethically and legally.

Intel's $699 Core i9-14900KS turbos to 6.2GHz – assuming you can keep it cool

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Looks like a lot of hassle for mostly minor benefits

Intel's previous high end consumer CPU doesn't have a convincing lead over AMD's offerings, and the turbo is only on a limited number of cores as has been the case for years. As the article says, it really does depend on your workload. Why bother with all this hassle until you're truly desperate for performance in specific applications?

Still, both Rzyen 9 and the i9 support ECC with the appropriate chipset, so that's good. The Performance and Efficiency cores seem an interesting idea too, but it looks like the number of applications that explicitly specify they want to optimise efficiency is quite low.

If I was looking for a new system, I'd definitely consider Ryzen. There's a lot of second hand Xeon systems on ebay though..

Fedora 41's GNOME to go Wayland-only, says goodbye to X.org

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Wayland only

Yes. They can like it, or write the code themselves.

OK, I'm deliberately being a bit contentious here. I do agree that Wayland is not finished, offers less user choice than X, and users (and particularly non Linux platforms) are increasingly not considered over developer and commercial interests. It also doesn't help there is almost no commercial non Linux Unix, so the perfect storm of X being funded by large companies and having to compromise to work on multiple platforms simply did not happen with Wayland.

However, it has always been that way to some extent. Pick a less popular configuration and you'll have issues with application support. It's also what a lot of Linux users want - functionality NOW! Forget catering for BSD or whatever, which limits functionality and slows development, but is also very likely to incorporate compromise and flexibility into a design.

Certain oft quoted benefits such as support for old hardware are also flat out wrong. If you've old, popular hardware it's very likely it still works, but this is only because of ongoing work from developers. There are at least *three* (four?) different display driver models in X, and maintaining old hardware support relies on drivers being re-written each time, it is not automatic.

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Dell omitting critical detail

Not really, that's one thing you can't blame Microsoft for - at least until Windows 11. Let's take a decent PC from 2008, it's still capable of web browsing and productivity even today.

It comes shipped with Vista. In 2009 Windows 7 is released, followed by 8, 8.1, and 10. With a suitable graphics adapter and a large enough hard drive/SSD the system could be usable from 2008 until right now.

Upgrading to Windows 11 wouldn't be possible without workarounds because the CPU would be too old, and so would the TPM (if it even had one, back in 2008).

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Move away

I'm genuinely glad to hear it - I just haven't used it at scale. It's just that some parts of it are substantially less turnkey and don't inspire as much confidence as MS SQL.

I mean, I accept that if it Was All That, then MS SQL would be far less prevalent, but still.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Move away

No. You don't hear nearly as many horror stories around MS SQL as you do about anything Oracle.

The only vaguely dodgy thing I remember MS doing SQL license wise was around the time of MS SQL 7 when it released prior to the web really hitting its stride, and implied you could run it as a back end to a web server using a standard per user license. This was tightened up by them trying to apply an updated license to SQL 7 later on, but the original license was still there printed out in black and white. They didn't make that mistake for future SQL releases.

Ultimately you're going to have to choose your flavour of poison, and to my mind Microsoft is better than Oracle in that regard.

PostgreSQL has some impressive features, but it still feels like an open source product (the backup facility is *appalling* for instance), and if some obvious parts of the product aren't polished, what's the confidence level in pushing serious amounts of important data through it?

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

I hope they get sued out of existance

From what I can see they're on extremely dodgy ground. A European consumer of a company with a large EU presence remains their customer regardless of their location.

There's also a double edged sword in that if Apple are trying to restrict customers in this way, if a non EU customer is then at a location where they're not in the EU, logically they should gain the benefits of that location, if any.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

DisplayPort is better, but the consumer experience is mostly worse

Fine if you're connecting one display device to one video source.

Troublesome if you want to switch between devices - it's likely you'll be paying considerably more than an HDMI switcher, and have to use a KVM rather than just a switch. The amount of advice online will be somewhat lower than for HDMI.

A pain if you want to run multiple monitors through one cable using DisplayPort MST. The tools for understanding the limitations of each MST hub in the signal path and what is actually happening to the signal appear generally non existent. Not to mention driver support can be distinctly variable.

I do like the fact I have a working setup using USB-C and DisplayPort hubs to drive three monitors off a small number of cables, but a multi port HDMI switch was mostly an awful lot easier to source and set up.

FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

It's not just Mint - it is a niche case, just as dual booting Mint/Ubuntu is, but the default EFI boot menu for FreeBSD doesn't handle multiple installations well (there's older, boot code that does handle this, but it's easier just to edit the boot config setting every time you want to boot the other OS). It's a bit annoying when you want one installation to use as a vaguely production system, and another install to check out -current or hack on the same version elsewhere.

I think some Intel server and possibly workstation boards may also have used 32 bit UEFI, I'd have to experiment with my quite unusual S3210SHLC board which uses the X38 offshoot S3210 chipset and features both an EFI bios and VT-d (PCI passthrough) support, but with Core2 processors.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

OK, it can never reach '100%' but 'feature complete' is when it matches or exceeds commercial products and handles the majority of situations you'd reasonably expect it to. I'll concede that a single disk stripe is an unusual oddity probably specific to a limited selection of motherboards (it was a pentium 4 one), but ZFS is moderately mainstream these days.

BIOS translation utilities intercepted BIOS calls and let large disks boot DOS on BIOSes that weren't designed for it. Outside DOS this tended not to work, it was rare for OS/2,NT, or Linux to support it, and Windows would be forced to use BIOS calls to access the disk rather than protected mode drivers.

It largely went away when LBA arrived, but there's still various limits, 128GB booting limits being a later one. The solution without translation software is to set all the OS bootable partitions entirely below the BIOS limit, and then the OS driver handles partitions above the BIOS limit.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

It depends what you mean by 'special' - some partitions are hidden from UEFI BIOSes, or are hidden when booting certain operating systems, but disk management software should allow you to see it.

There's also an MBR in every GPT disk which contains a protective MBR to highlight to conventional MBR tools the disk is being used for GPT.

Whilst the functionality of various Linux tools is impressive for free, it is not necessarily feature complete.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Must give it a go some time

Being able to do what Partition Magic and Ghost did for free is certainly welcome.

I always tend to find some of the rough edges, though, including an inability to cope with disks in a system using an early SATA controller that sets up disks as a stripe with one disk in it. Windows is fine with it, but some partition tools throw a wobbler.

Also, ZFS. Some Linux partition tools don't know what to do with disks with a ZFS signature on them, and the functionality in wipefs is not built in.

BEAST AI needs just a minute of GPU time to make an LLM fly off the rails

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: All that's required is an Nvidia RTX A6000 GPU with 48GB memory

4 grand. Not obscene in the grand scheme of things, just generally outside the reach of most enthusiastic amateurs

I would imagine that it's also possible on GPUs with less memory, it'll just take a fair bit longer. 16GB GPUs are readily available. Tends to get rather expensive beyond there though.

Nvidia aren't the sole supplier of GPUs - there's also AMD and Nvidia, it's just that AMD are content being an also ran, and Intel are still pretty early in re-entering the GPU market.

Broadcom CEO pay award jumps 164% to $160.8 million

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Insert obligatory Lord Farquaad 'some of you may die' meme here

I mean, if you *really* wanted to change the system include all holding companies, and all suppliers and outsourced functions, including those in third world countries. Yes, I know then the executives who 'will move country if you raise taxes, honest guv' might actually move country to somewhere with more permissive ruling, but you could at least try to make it a bit fairer.

I'm not against decent pay, or a healthy differential, but that much money is extracting the urine.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Insert obligatory Lord Farquaad 'some of you may die' meme here

If ever there was a reason to make CEO pay a maximum multiple of the lowest paid worker..

The self-created risk in Broadcom's big VMware kiss-off

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

We did, although it was more for platform consolidation and ongoing costs than VMWare's behaviour as far as I'm aware. For historic reasons we had a large VMWare on-prem system that was costing us a lot of money. Requests to migrate started early 2023 if not before, and were repeatedly followed up throughout the year.

I completed the migration in my area prior to the end of the year. Some of the VMs were old and in need of a little spring cleaning that it was easier to re-provision, copy data and setup, rather than upgrade and live migrate.

We are largely a Windows shop. There's also a lot of legacy but that's being effectively migrated. As such it makes sense to go to Hyper-V, and from an end VM user point of view rather than VM management there's no discernible difference between VMWare and Hyper V VMs. If anything it's better now.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Emulation of hardware? Not any more

This is possibly nitpicking, but it's important in some cases : 'Virtualization's entire purpose is to vanish entirely by precisely mimicking hardware' was never true and increasingly is only a vague relation to the truth, but it doesn't matter much any more.

The early virtualisation products were 'good enough' emulations of hardware that if you squinted a bit looked like it probably was a real PC, but even then there were gaps - OpenBSD failed on one virtualisation product because it used a particular unemulated network card feature no other OS did.

Qemu (which is both an emulator by itself and also used by some hypervisors to create a device tree) has a few separate PC types : Q35, 440FX, and ISA. These are all old, from 2010, 1996, and potentially 1981 respectively. There are some very unusual PCs out there, particularly in the industrial PC arena, but seeing a 2023 CPU hanging off a 1996 host chipset is more than a little odd.

it doesn't matter, however. Emulation and virtualisation by being a close hardware representation is also wasteful, and as virtualisation popularity grew the operating system vendors started modifying their operating systems to specifically support virtualisation. Today there are both optimisations when operating systems realise they are running inside a VM, and virtual hardware drivers that bear a passing resemblance to real hardware but have efficiency and convenience far over precisely emulating the real item.

It's a mature market [1] so whilst migrating VMs can to some extent be a hassle, the architecture is generally understood, and there are tools to assist the process. Broadcom may have some ability to lock in VMWare customers due to their management tools, but also face the danger with all system migrations that an audit naturally tends to occur at the same time not infrequently reducing the amount of required licences and leading to re-evaluation of the solution.

[1] There are established vendors such as VMWare, Xen, Microsoft, and cloud providers. Most other operating systems also feature hypervisors with varying degrees of functionality and operating system support - a serial console, network adapter, and storage are all that's required to get some useful work started. Then there are emulators such as Qemu that are sometimes hardware assisted, that run almost everywhere, and moving into specific domain support such as DOSBox 'looks like DOS enough to run games, but not much else' and DOSBox-X 'accurate enough it should run DOS/Win9x business apps'.

I don't see guaranteed PCI passthrough support without a hardware compatibility list working any time soon though. Too many dependencies, hardware bugs, and configuration issues.

Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 surfaces on eBay

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Worth noting the discovery that made OS/2 1 redundant

I can understand the 286 being a fab process stop gap, but that's a different matter from it enforcing the mass market staying on 16 bit.

As I've mentioned on reflection I believe the market was driven by 1) memory - all the 'proper' protected mode OS tended to eat memory for breakfast, and it was expensive and 2) applications. People thought I was a bit mad getting a 486 with 8MB memory to run OS/2 2.1 in 1993, and really that was the reasonable minimum, not the comfortable amount.

Even if OS/2 and NT are discounted (not entirely unfair, neither achieved mass market) the mass market was *heavily* using 32 bit well before 95. At the low end there were DOS programs escaping some of DOS' limitations with DOS extenders, predominantly DOS/4GW. Outside DOS, as soon as Windows 3.1 was released in 1992 it was very clear that its 286 supporting protected mode was a second class citizen, and real mode had been dropped entirely. On the run up to Windows 95 various parts of 32 bit code had been added for disk and network drivers, and win32s operated as a stop gap enabling a subset of the Win32 API to run on Windows 3.11.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Worth noting the discovery that made OS/2 1 redundant

There's a few 80186 PCs, but they're rare. One reason is that the 80186 has some incompatibilities with the 8086/88 that the 286 doesn't suffer from.

The 80286 is, in general, faster than the 80386 at the same clock speed - but it does depend what you're running and which processor a program was written for.

The 286 was really, really fast at text based applications with some graphics at the time, but if you had the software to take advantage of a 386 it was clearly better.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Guess what 'thus far lost to history' means?

Yes, if you want 'OS/2' and aren't picky about the variety you can go and buy a modern release right now in the instance of ArcaOS, hit ebay and get an historic copy (mostly of 3.x or 4.x, 1.x and 2.x are less common), or a few Internet sites where you can 'obtain' a number of disk or ISO images for quite a few releases including barely released products such as OS/2 PowerPC.

However this is an extremely early release of OS/2 2.0 that isn't archived anywhere. There's no guarantee that even Microsoft has a copy or would be prepared to release it.

Sometimes software is lost to history without backups. This is especially true if it's a pre release no longer considered useful, or a number of games where source control is frequently lacking (once it's been shipped for a while, a number of companies historically weren't concerned with keeping it for the future)

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Worth noting the discovery that made OS/2 1 redundant

The reason for OS/2 was multitasking and memory protection. Even 16MB became a noticeable limit for certain OS/2 applications reasonably early on. OS/2 should have been released for the 386 to start, but early 386 steppings were extremely buggy, it wasn't a cheap processor, and IBM had made commitments to bring OS/2 to the 286.

There's a lot of reasons for OS/2's failure and the breakup, but the large ones were because of the success of Windows 3.0 due to its applications and crucially the reduced memory usage. OS/2 required more memory than Windows up until the mid nineties when it no longer mattered. NT had similarly high requirements but the majority of users chose 3.x and 9x instead due to lower hardware requirements. greater driver support, and prior to 2000 certain features such as USB and DirectX.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

The reason for NT's OS/2 subsystem

Obviously Lan Manager wasn't needed once NT was released. Don't know about SQL Server, but the mail routing component of MS Mail definitely required OS/2, and until Exchange was available that was one reason the subsystem had to remain.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Nice museum piece

I know you're putting up the 'joke' icon, and you're probably right - in terms of reading them as-is in a random 5.25" drive some disks probably don't work.

However there have been recent articles about what can be achieved with a Greaseweazel. an oscilloscope, and a waveform editor. With careful selection of a good floppy drive, and manual correction of sectors where the data are unreadable (by studying the peaks and troughs in the waveform and correcting it) it can be possible to completely recover data

VMware takes a swing at Nutanix, Red Hat with KVM conversion tool

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: There is a need for stand-alone hosts

Xen hasn't been buried, there's still XCP-NG. You can also build it from the bare metal, I was mad enough to run a Salix based Xen system a number of years ago using the LILO bootloader, it worked fine until I had a hardware failure. Linux dom0 naturally, NetBSD is as ever too shonky, FreeBSD lacks passthrough, Illumos Xen0 appears long dead.

Had a play with XCP-NG last week, was moderately impressed. If you want 'completely free' you'll have to install the community maintained Xen Orchestrator rather than the bundled XOA VM which pushes you towards the maintained but still 'free as in beer' 'please buy a license' XCP options, and 'set up an account with a third party to do anything useful'.

The xl and xe utilities at the command line appear solid, as does the ability to modify boot parameters without faffing around with linux-isms of grub defaults and initramfs or similar.

XOA, at least the one installable over the Internet prior to updates, seems a bit unfinished. Error messages are opaque. It is not designed for a single standalone system hosting both the VMs and an ISO storage pool. Still, xe commands can work around that.

Got VMs working including passthrough with minimal hassle.

KVM doesn't seem that bad either. A try of virt-manager and it was all working fairly easily. Passthrough is more of a pain though.

It's great that in the last seven years ish or so we've gone from virtualisation being an occasionally provided option which requires a lot of fiddling to being bundled in most available OS : Windows (Hyper V), Linux (KVM), Xen[1], FreeBSD (bhyve), OpenBSD (vmm). A basic VM is now easy. Migration is available some times. Passthrough is still a bit of an arse - too many hardware, driver, and chipset foibles out there.

[1] I'm a particular fan that Xen is a type 1 hypervisor, and that PV or PVH dom0 guests load underneath it and can therefore have devices completely hidden from them for PCI passthrough, whereas for KVM you're going to have to stick things in the initramfs or mark modules for early load or blacklist. For hypervisors such as bhyve which are still distressingly bleeding edge, whilst devices can be captured by the passthrough driver it's impossible to exclude them from being probed by the OS really early in the boot process.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Brings back flashbacks of migrating VMWare images between ESXi versions

It was a bit more than 'a disk image with metadata'. It was typically several files that needed to be converted into one monolithic image, that can then be copied to your new server and converted to the new ESXi format. It worked but was a real pain.

Then again, this was doing it the free way. I'm sure VCenter makes it a snap. VMWare have progressively restricted what is permitted with the free product for years. Can't blame them really, but it does make you wonder why they're targeting KVM, just when it's becoming half decent.

I always used vCenter Converter in the past for going to ESXi, at least until they gutted the functionality and prevented it working properly with later releases.

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Re: Less data stored is the entire point of GDPR!

That shouldn't be a problem though? There was plenty of notice, and there very probably still is time to do so before any potential disaster hits.

To give work credit, although they're not perfect we do take things quite seriously. Every year has been an improvement in data storage and security. Far, far better than a decade ago (but we were then owned by another company who had less stringent standards, and insufficient interest in improving them).

The slightly depressing part is that although we offer GDPR provision for every customer, only a small subset have requested it to be set up.

There is also a degree of self interest. For some customers we're actively pruning historic data, not because of GDPR, but because regular penetration tests and security audits are such a huge pain for legacy customers it's to our advantage to get rid of legacy systems. Which admittedly does make all this testing pretty useful.

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Less data stored is the entire point of GDPR!

I've very mixed feelings about GDPR.

Data can only be stored for defined purposes for as long as required to achieve those aims. Given that some types of data are only legally required by the authorities for the past <n> years data shouldn't be kept for longer than that, and that results in lower storage costs.

Having implemented clear down for various customers it's not straight forward either, particularly if the functionality isn't built in to a pre GDPR product. Ensuring data are cleared down, it doesn't impact on performance, data aren't prematurely cleared down due to customer mistakes, and ideally that there is a (temporary, which is itself shortly cleared down) log that a clear down occurred for instances when data are incorrectly marked as old, cleared down, and the customer asks where the data have gone..

However, whilst GDPR is a worthwhile principle, legally mandating it is the point at which my enthusiasm fades. Companies who do the right thing will do the right thing regardless. The cowboys will continue to flout it and the punishment is, precisely what, exactly?

It's added another layer of useless cruft to the web, and again, sites that don't apply GDPR properly are very rarely corrected.

Not to mention that the government, perhaps the prime target to apply the GDPR properly, have exceptions, routinely flout the rules, and don't apply it. Remember the DVLA contacting every holder of a HGV license to ask if they wanted to drive trucks again? Certainly illegal under the GDPR, but they did it anyway. Witness the obscured and redacted ongoing dodgy Palantir contract with the NHS. Etc.

Wyze admits 13,000 users could have viewed strangers' camera feeds

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

'This represented around 0.25 percent of all users'

It may be 0.25% of all users, but 1504 users out of 13,000 is a not inconsiderable 8%, and you can safely bet the number would have been much higher if the access had been left open longer.

There's no sign of anyone following the sensible advice of :

Never buy an IoT device you can't host elsewhere or at home (To be fair, it appears possible to do this for Wyze)

Don't trust the vendor's cloud service. Especially if it's cheap.

If having the data inadvertently exposed is that important or distressing, don't expose it.

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

There are a few, but they're a bit specialist.

USB sticks generally take an ISO image anyway, but ISO images specifically are useful for workstation or server motherboards with network media redirection built in

There may be instances where you need to boot a system but don't want to have USB enabled.

The media redirection detailed above may require legacy USB support to be enabled, but legacy USB support can sometimes cause issues with PCI passthrough in virtualisation. I'd have to check if USB sticks themselves work without legacy support set to on.

I'll grant that actual physical media use has dropped to the point that 'DVD' and 'CD' images do not always fit on an actual DVD-R, and most of the time a USB stick, or a Zalman VE USB CD/DVD emulator is a better idea.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

Still trying to move away from Windows, wonder if I'll make it by 2025 though..

I'm still aiming to not move to Windows 11 at home (at work, already on 11. It mostly works but I'm getting very tired of the bug of taskbar icons going blank, and occasional multi desktop bugs).

It's probably much easier if you're on Linux. On FreeBSD things are more tricky, particularly as I want to use WINE for games. Old games : largely fine. More modern ones, running into problems. Bhyve virtualisation is basically functional but needs work, especially for PCI passthrough. I'm not optimistic it will all be sorted in a year when Windows 10 support ends.

I'm perfectly prepared to pay for up to three years of extended Windows 10 support, by that time hopefully WINE will be in better shape on FreeBSD. Expecting VR support is unlikely though!

For everyday use FreeBSD works fine for browsing and basic productivity, but so long as I keep booting Windows for games or specific apps, I haven't migrated yet.

That also, depressingly, means in the mid 90s when I was in Peak OS/2 Enthusiasm I hadn't managed to ditch Windows properly either. True I was only booting OS/2, but my dissertation was written in Ami Pro for Windows under WinOS/2, because all the OS/2 word processor options sucked. I had a licensed copy of Describe, but it wasn't pleasant to use for long documents and they never added a word counter despite many, many prompts. Ami Pro for OS/2 was horrendously buggy, Word Pro was OK but released after I needed a proper word processor, WordPerfect wasn't great either. I'm not sure Star Office was around, and things like Open/Libreoffice weren't even a speck on the horizon.