Posts by JLV

Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

I don't know how much money it would have been worth before MS bought it, but with the Anti-Midas in charge, it will likely be less in short order.

I wonder, we talk big about how much we dislike MS - I do as well, though not as much as some. How will this work out? General rule of thumb is that in case like this, most of the public does not share the outrage of the engaged community and the unwashed masses continue to graze contentedly.

Win 10 is not a great success, true, but then again most stores still sell PCs with it, companies run it, etc... Apple is pricey enough that Windows stays in the running and are not to everyone's taste either. Linux is still patiently waiting on its desktop year.

The sky didn't fall for Win 10 + telemetry, not even for 8. Face it, some of us care, most people don't.

But Github is different: its constituents are precisely developers, open-sources ones to boot. Technically, individuals could easily move, if they knew where to go. Companies maybe less easily, but one thing MS has achieved is giving Google a black eye for relying on Github - at least some big organizations will be motivated to fly the coop. Unlike Linkedin (or FB), Github has limited built-in network effects - the apt-get/pypy/npm/yarn/etc... type endpoint installers can be just rerouted to look elsewhere - they're their respective ecosystems network-effect bits, not the hosting providers. Many devs may take considerably less pride in having their calling cards on MS properties.

We're on Github because we choose to be, not because we have to.

If this ends up turning into a referendum on the popularity of Microsoft with developers in the late 10s, what will it tell us? What will it look like if, in 2-3 years, Github is now #2 or #3 in growth?

I am very doubtful about the upsides for MS, but a severe drop in Github influence and market share from now on would be a gigantic and very public egg in the face for MS, bought at the cost of $7.5B.

Re: Disney probably is more of an IT company than AOL

+1

The Mouse, with Michael Eisner, was also the first company where a non-founding, employee-type, CEO breached the $100M/year remuneration barrier. Not that he lost much $$$$ when the company started under-performing later on - it took years to evict his sorry ass.

CEO and C-level pay and bonuses being a pox on the face of citizens, employees and, yes, shareholders, Disney has a lot to answer for in our context of ever greater rapaciousness, greed and public distrust - warranted or not - of people who manage companies and free markets.

Why do you say that?

Give it another 5-10 years and the only jets we'll have will be F35s.

Then we'll truly be fucked.

Re: 'Nuff Said

There is one valid point in the whole thingymagig - Oracle installs are not at all frictionless. The rest is a fair bit of hyperbolery, esp Mongo stuff.

On macOS or Linux you can't just install SQLNet connectivity. You need to download it, accept all sorts of useless download conditions and only then can you install it. Ever heard of apt-get, macport or homebrew? Guess not. Looking to auto install it with Chef, it was a mess because they only provide it in RPM format, not great on Ubuntu. Lots of funky and unstable looking Chef packages to deal with that - I ended up just doing an apt-get install alien an inelegant but simple hack.

Not the database itself, which, of course, is costly. Just the connectivity driver, which is free. Which of course sucks to configure - tsnsnames.ora, anyone? And sqlplus deserves to be roasted, quartered and staked out on an anthill, in whichever order makes it the most painful.

Matt does have a point that complicated and expensive licenses really get in the way for starting up. This particular issue is, I believe, also going to bite MS hard, which is why they are pushing Linux hard - they know Linux is easier to experiment with, unless they bite the bullet and free up Windows licenses outside the enterprise crowd. Lose enough experimenters and you may start losing real business too.

If your needs can be met with Postgresql, it is a brilliant little piece of RDBMS tech. I can definitely see it eating up smaller Oracle db business for custom apps - where the db is not already predetermined by a vendor - going forward. I'd love to know how well it scales up in the GB ranges, but it really is impressive. Very much unlike MySQL, which isn't.

Still, at the end of the day, when you really need a big big RDBMS and have $$$$$$$$$$$, Oracle is not the worst choice. Neither is SQL Server.

Re: top 5 causes for major IT project failure *still* top 5 causes cause of major IT failure

Hmmm, at $850m and counting, "on budget" wasn't exactly a high-priority priority they achieved either ;-)

They should have tested w at least 2 major departments, preferably with 2 different collective agreements/unions underpinning payrolls. This project was supposed to consolidate multiple departments, so even a 1 dept successful pilot might not have unearthed challenges w merging many departments.

Feds already run PeopleSoft payroll, so messing this up was not a given from the start.

Re: Can't have it both ways, guys.

Quite true, but claiming that journos are never influenced by ad revenue aspects stretches my credulity quite a bit.

Witness Fox News and their squirming over cancelled ad campaigns when some of their presenters wander off reservation more than usual.

That said, Musk might do well to ponder on not imitating the orange buffoon's Twitter use.

See this little jewel was left out of the article.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/emergency-brakes-were-disabled-by-ubers-self-driving-software-ntsb-says/

the driver was distracted by having to review/flag an Uber touchscreen, which logs significant trip contextual info. This is part of her job, _per Uber design_.

Un-fucking-believable. I would love to see a $10M+ fine, and jail time for the brakes-off / driver-does-other-stuff decision makers @ Uber.

It's just so callous, it seems like a caricature of shitty corporate profit-seeking behavior by a retarded script writer.

Re: Re:

>Spoilt vodka then?

There is no such thing as spoilt vodka, comrade. All is good to drink for real men, up to and including tank transmission fluid.

http://www.russianiron.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=12931

Re: Fishy

He he, thought I'd quote Linux himself from your post:

>and the companies that

we could get involved by showing that we are not all insane crazy

people like the FSF.

;-)

Re: bombing cities

No, what they missed was the steadfastness and courage shown by civilians of countries under attack and ability to rally. In a way, that's part and parcel with the old adage, beloved of Putin and co, that one way to stay in power at home is to create an external threat.

The part about winning hearts and minds is however a bit misplaced wrt Nazi Germany. Not because I feel that killing German civilians was a good aim - it wasn't. But thinking that "if only we had been a bit nicer they would have thrown off bad Mr. Hitler" is wishful thinking. German civs had no choice whatsoever in their gov past '33. Also one could argue that keeping thousands of guns and aircraft off the Eastern Front was the most worthwhile contribution the Western Allies could make until D Day.

The oft-mentioned increase in German war production throughout 43, 44 is a bit of red herring. Pre-43, Hitler was trying to run the war on guns _and_ butter and Germany did not go to a full war economy. In comes Speer and he shakes it all up. Might have increased even more wo the strategic bombings.

But these are all valid points re. Douhet and Western morality until quite recently. I don't know when we changed, perhaps it was after Communism fell. But during the Vietnam War for example there was thought of bombing the North's dams and causing massive floods. "Killing 1 million of them, surely that'll teach them to mess with us". Ditto dirty wars in Central America.

Now we agonize when the news shows - and I think that's a good thing - a few civilians getting killed by mistake in Raqqa.

When we confront the modern evils of Islamic Jihad, it might be worthwhile to remember that, for all our outrage about the targeting of non-combatants, that was the Western norm in warfare until quite recently. Even more so when dealing with non-whites. Pre WW1 there wasn't heavy intentional killing of civilians in Europe. But invading armies "lived off the land".

Fixing the Jihad problem is a matters of hearts and minds - towards the larger Muslim population (ISIS members are fair game in my book). Being more aware of our own checkered ethics history and how it can be perceived is necessary.

Re: Surely though

I believe it was Bruce Schneier who warned (sure he's not the only one) that a system with too many false alarms lowers security.

Let's pretend you're a guerrilla wanting to attack a fortified camp, which is ringed with smart fence kit. Now, have a herder drive goats near it for a month, setting off the alarm every night. Soon enough, the guards are going to turn off the fence, or ignore its warnings.

The camp is now less safe than if it relied on Mk 1 Eyeballs. Esp if the army decides it can do with less men cuz 50M$ fences. And even more so if the generals insist those fences work against real world evidence.

Re: Really?

>no cheap Honda spares in France

Heureusement que je n'habite depuis longtemps plus en France donc ;-)

Seriously though, I don't doubt you can benefit greatly from year 1 and 2 depreciation on used cars. You just have to know what you're doing. I'll buy smartphones used myself, because I find those easy to assess.

Re: Issue 1 of a comic

Whether it's Windows related or not is besides the point. Lenovo, for me, is a company that shows it can't be trusted and will go out of its way, not just misconfigure, to put a few $ ahead of its customers' privacy and security.

I also avoid Sony for the CD DRM rootkit. Really childish of me, I know.

How you feel about that incident is entirely your decision, I don't claim to be more right than you are.

Re: Nice to hear an un-hypgasm-filled account

"1903: Kitty Hawk, 1909: Bleriot crosses Channel

Just another example of engineers doing something that won't ever have practical applications."

Sometimes it's worth thinking in terms of potential, esp when there are no obvious theoretical barriers to something improving. The 20th century has had a long run of quick progress from ho-hum beginnings (general AI and fusion being exceptions).

I have yet to even try a VR headset, but mostly because none of the games - and I am a gamer - feel like they'd be more than gimmicks.

My interest would actually be more in data representation/coding/visualisation. Neuromancer, not Ready Player One.

No obligation to cheer Oculus Go. But moving on to dismiss the whole technology's potential seems rather premature.

Re: "but someone will need to maintain the code for many years."

Amen.

Mid 90s Visual Studio db access stub wizards did the var1, var2 up the wazoo. To the point where the thing was factually useless as it was write-only, cant-be-read code.

Which of course the reviewing journalists had been too dazzled to realize.

Re: jail is a deterrent (as well as a punishment)

>I would be happy to see life sentences for 419 and "your computer has a virus" scammers

As a taxpayer, would you also be happy to pay for the associated jail costs? I recall one of the big components of the California budget crisis a few years back was all those 100K+/year correctional officers. Whose union had probably heavily promoted 3 strike laws.