Posts by thames 1125 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2014
"I also have to wonder if the fine folks in the Michigan Agency of Bullocks and Computer Machines weren't at least partially complicit"
It takes epic levels of incompetence on all sides for this sort of Olympic level of screw up. However, given that there are multiple states all experiencing the same problem upgrading similar systems with HP though, I suspect the main culprit is HP.
"Could it be that HP is more interested in cutting staff than servicing customers?"
Could it be that HP simply outsourced the whole thing to the cheapest bidder in some place like India, who then split it up into packets and outsourced those to the cheapest sub-contractors they could find, etc.? I think that for many big companies "servicing customers" these days simply refers to having your sales staff spin them a story about how your outsource contractors are "95% done!" when they've actually walked off the job a while ago because they got fed up with being screwed around.
"Surely there must be a channel company out there that could do better."
It would be pretty hard to do worse.
Having read the original Microsoft announcement, it sounds like they needed to work with a lot of existing hardware, open source and other third party software, SDKs, etc. Since all or nearly all of those were Linux only, Microsoft was faced with the choices of either using Linux, redeveloping everything themselves from scratch based on reverse engineering the Linux software, or else give up any hope of being the market at all. It's kind of like the choice that desktop software developers face in business markets, except the shoe is on the other foot in this case.
Linux dominates the mobile and tablet market (Android), high performance computing, 32 and 64 bit embedded systems, cloud, and now apparently SDN. Microsoft has their niche in the PC market, but it doesn't look like they will ever expand Windows very much outside of that. That doesn't mean that Windows is about to go away, but it does probably mean that it will become more like the traditional (non-Linux) mainframe market - supporting legacy systems in a stagnant or slowly declining market segment.
There's definitely a need for better security. I can't realistically see mass market consumer phones of any description filling this need though. There's just too much contradiction between "convenience" and "security". That pretty much rules out Apple, standard Android, and Microsoft (if they want to be more than just a minor niche player).
It really needs a specialist who will be satisfied with a small single digit market share, but who will sell a handset built for security and also offer a server and management system with end to end security. If it runs most of the common serious apps but not the games or "crap apps" (e..g. a million and one flash lights), then that's fine.
Oh wait, there's already someone who does that, and their name is Blackberry. They just need to bin the QNX OS and sell handsets based on a customised version of Android. They can sandbox apps so that they don't get unnecessary permissions, or they can give them access to "fake" ones like dummy e-mail boxes.
Then sysadmins can just buy phones off the shelf which come already "locked down" instead of sweating over how to do it themselves (and doing it wrong). Forget the BYOD, business only goes through the business phone.
If not Blackberry, then someone else. However, it would need to be a small to mid-size company who focusses on this and only this. Larger companies wouldn't keep focus since they would need a larger market share to justify their overheads. It needs to be a security specialist who focuses on the business market and who has no ambition to sell to the general consumer market. They need to be big enough to have global presence, but small enough to not lose focus. They also have to be willing to license out their server back-end software to larger customers so that there's no single central "cloud" infrastructure for the NSA (or GCHQ or whoever) to get their grubby little fingers into.
I can't really see any other solution working.
Ahmed has also been invited to Chris Hadfield's (former astronaut and commander of the ISS space station) "Generator" science themed show in Toronto. He's been offered a free ticket, and a hotel has offered him a free room.
https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield
"his principal and police suspected a homemade digital clock he brought to class was intended to be a hoax bomb"
Yes, it had all the elements of a bomb, except for anything that looked like a bomb. They claim to be surprised that a skinny kid with spectacles and a NASA t-shirt fiddles around with technology instead of running around with an assault rifle and a confederate flag like a "real American"? I bet he believes in that there "evil-ution" nonsense as well.
I was just about to order a new Raspberry Pi 2. It's just as well that I don't live in the US or I might end up in Guantanamo Bay for possessing weapons of mass destruction. Or I would if my name was Ahmed or Mohammed or something like that.
Icon is explosion, for obvious reasons.
"Developer tools vendor JetBrains has run into a storm of protest over its announcement of subscription pricing"
Protesting is what you do when the other guy really has no reason to listen to you. Switch to a different IDE or editor. There's loads of them out there, and lots of them are free and open source which means that it costs you nothing to try them. Try out several, pick one, and get on with life.
I've switched between IDEs and editors over the decades more times than I can remember. The most fabulous one that I can recall was UCSD P-System, where the OS basically was an IDE. The ASE editor was really different, but incredibly productive once you got used to it. The whole edit/compile/run cycle was amazingly fast and fluid because the IDE was deeply integrated into the OS, not just an application that ran on top of it. If you used it with a Wyse WY-50 terminal on a 38.4 kbaud serial connection, the code seemed to go from your imagination straight into the editor bypassing your fingers altogether.
But guess what? Those days are long gone. I got over it. I've used various MS-DOS stuff, CP/M and mainframe editors I can't remember the names of, massively over-complicated Windows stuff, and various odds and ends on Linux. I've also used some truly horrific IDEs for a variety of embedded industrial controls.
Right now I'm mainly using Geany on Linux. It does everything I want, and I'm probably only using a fraction of its features. I also found out that unlike Windows, Linux (or any unix-like OS) is like having the OS as part of the IDE and if you're doing everything from inside the IDE, you're doing it wrong. I also found out that automating development tasks through scripting is a lot faster and less prone to failure than manually clicking my way through ever changing menus in an IDE-that-wants-to-be-an-OS hundreds of times over and over again.
So, don't get angry. JetBrains wants one thing and you want another? Just shrug and move on. That's life.
Why is it that when the country that may have done it is someone like China or Russia, their names are shouted from the rooftops by every news source, but when the target list and modus operandi suggests that it was the US who did it the press gets all coy and doesn't want to talk about it?
That's very, very, odd, isn't it? I mean we do have a free press who will fearlessly report the facts, right? Or do we?
@g00se - I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 (with Unity). Firefox has its own traditional scrollbars, but for the rest the scrollbars don't actually disappear. They just shrink down to a narrow orangish line. When you move your mouse over it, it expands out to normal width, but in a greyish sort of colour, and you can drag it up and down.
The "hidden" (actually just small, not hidden) bar corresponds to the traditional slider. It changes size and position depending upon how much there is to display and where you are in the scroll space. When expanded out, it also incorporates the little triangle scroll buttons which are normally at the top and bottom of a traditional scroll bar.
What is missing is the "bar" the slider would normally slide in. That is, you get the slider and the scroll buttons but not the empty bar the slider would move in - you just get the slider hanging out over the page when it's expanded to full size.
So no, they don't only appear on a mouse over. You can at all times see if there is more to scroll and where you are in the scroll space. The slider just shrinks down to take up less space when you're not using it. The same is true for both vertical and horizontal sliders.
I didn't like these scroll bars at first, but I changed my mind after having them for a while and appreciating getting more usable screen space as a result. I work with a lot of open windows in multiple workspaces, and I appreciate getting every little bit of usable space possible while still being able to see things at a glance.
As an aside, the desktop wars seem to be just as bitter as ever, surpassing even the vi/emacs conflict. Take negative comments about desktops or distros in forums with a very large grain of salt, because a lot of them are pretty obviously written by people whose knowledge of that particular desktop doesn't extend beyond having looked at a few screen shots (I'm not referring to you - you asked a serious and relevant question).
I've used KDE, Gnome 2 (and perhaps 1, but I can't recall) and Unity extensively. Of the three, I prefer Unity because it has a simple interface that lets me see at a glance what is going on, and it was a very easy learning curve when I switched from Gnome 2 (unlike when I went from KDE to Gnome 2). After first using Unity for about 20 minutes, there was no way I wanted to go back to Gnome 2, which was ironic since at the time I was evaluating it so I could write a blog post on how rubbish it was going to be (because it wasn't Gnome 2). I've no problems with recommending it to anyone who just wants to get work done.
I've never seen a Lumia Windows phone, and I don't know anyone who has one, but I suspect that the few people who do are getting a feeling of deja-vu.
1) Buy Window Phone - it's great!
2) OK, it's not great, but the OS upgrade will be.
3) That OS upgrade? It doesn't work on your phone. Buy a new phone.
4) Next upgrade - see #3.
5) But the Nokia apps and cloud services are so great and that's why you should use Windows Phone!
6) Those cloud services? We're binning them. Try our new ones after we delete all your data.
From what I've heard from the developer oriented announcements from Microsoft, software development has been moved under the thumbs of the traditional software divisions in the company and they aren't all that keen on spending resources on phone development when they are struggling to get their mainstream PC and server releases out. The phone announcements always come last, as an afterthought. The phone features always lag the PC and server builds.
Instead of just letting the phone and tablet division die off slowly, they should just pull the plug right now, admit that it's a failure, and put it behind them. If Nokia couldn't sell Windows phone, it's pretty difficult to see how Microsoft expects to do better.
"This is a move that might point to a port of the Xiaomi MIUI user interface used on the phones to the laptop and would be consistent with the company’s plans to be a source of content as well as hardware."
I wouldn't be surprised if they used a customised version of Ubuntu for it. Canonical have been working with a major un-named Chinese ODM for a while on exactly this sort of thing.
The OS may carry the Xiaomi brand name and styling, but it would be Ubuntu underneath and have access to Ubuntu's repositories, developers, infrastructure, and security fixes. Canonical have also been working with game developers to get game platforms on Ubuntu.
The standard applications could be hooked into Xiaomi cloud services by default, and probably sync files with Xiaomi phones. Xiaomi could add their own proprietary apps for this pre-installed.
The fact that it wouldn't use the same Android apps from the Xiaomi phones is pretty much irrelevant, since phone apps aren't really written for desktop use anyway.
£3,612.60, plus VAT - I rather suspect that they're not getting many new users these days. They're probably mainly milking the users with an existing code base which they can't justify porting to use new libraries. It's an understandable business decision from both perspectives, but it leads to ever-increasing prices to squeeze out that last bit of cash from each remaining customer.
I used the original TurboPascal 3 on MSDOS, Turbopascal 4, and Turbo C back when these were pretty good products at what at the time were very low prices. They were seen as revolutionary in their day, as they brought quite good compilers (and later IDEs) at very reasonable prices to the masses. When Turbo Pascal originally came out, it was mainly competing against interpreted Basic (with GOTOs and line numbers). Turbo Pascal provided a very cheap product with compile times that were so fast as to give a compile/test cycle that was as good as from an interpreter.
Turbo Pascal started off as Compass Pascal from Denmark. Borland bought it and gave it the sort of mass market access which was difficult to get in those pre-Internet days. It came with a very good book, perhaps one of the best examples of documentation to be found in those days. There was no copy protection, but the book which came with the compiler was so good that it was worth buying (about $50 I think) just for that, making piracy not really worth the effort.
I used Turbo Pascal and Turbo C professionally and was quite satisfied with them. If you worked in the test and instrument field they were the most widely supported options for software development, with Microsoft's compiler trailing behind in support by vendors and pretty much everyone else being ignored by the hardware vendors (NI, KM, HP, etc.).
These days it's pretty difficult to make a living from selling mass market development tools when there is GCC and lately LLVM as compilers, and a million and one editors/IDEs available for free (I'm using Geany these days, which I'm quite happy with). A very big chunk of the market which Turbo Pascal originally addressed is also filled these days by Python, which comes "batteries included" and has a huge selection of free third party libraries available which do just about anything you can imagine.
Turbo Pascal was considered to be revolutionary it its day, but it's a very different world now.
I seem to remember that various people working on security systems wanted stackable modules years ago, but the SE Linux people protested against it on the grounds that everybody should just use SE Linux and that therefore stackable modules were redundant.
I'm not surprised to see this now. It was predicted that this would come back once everyone was willing to admit that SE Linux isn't a panacea (nor is Apparmour or Tomoyo).
"education minister Adrian Piccoli has refused to tell budget estimators how much the giant SAP rollout is likely to cost, if it's ever completed"
How could I ever guess this is what the story was about?
"Back in 2013, Accenture regarded the project as a success story."
I must be psychic, because somehow I just knew I would see their name here.
"The Auditor-General's report last year attributed the project's problems to ... and insufficient program and contract management."
Somehow I suspect there was loads of program and contract management. What was more likely lacking was people who knew what they were doing and who could see that this whole project was doomed to go this way once someone decided they wanted a single gigantic system that would do everything, including making the tea in the morning.
@bazza - "Isn't the one defining point of GPL that any other license, no matter what it says, is essentially incompatible with it?"
Er, no. There is non-GPL code in the Linux kernel, for example some MIT stuff. However, one of the major characteristics of any GPL-type license is the "no additional restrictions" clause. That is, you may not impose any additional licensing restrictions or requirements on the software which were not originally present. That is intended to keep the software open.
The reason that CDDL is incompatible with GPL is exactly what the Sun CDDL license drafter said in on of my earlier posts.
"The CDDL is not expected to be compatible with the GPL, since it contains requirements that are not in the GPL," Claire Giordano of Sun's CDDL team"
As you can see, according to the licensing experts at Sun, CDDL would impose additional licensing requirements which are not present in GPL.
There's a list at the following link which tells you which common FOSS licenses are compatible with GPL.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
Here's a few compatible examples from their list:
* Artistic License 2.0 (Perl).
* Berkeley DB License (Sleepycat Software license).
* Boost Software license.
* Newer BSD (2-clause BSD - very early versions had an third clause with a mandatory advertising requirement which was not compatible and which caused loads of headaches for other people as well).
* MIT (basically the same as 2 clause BSD).
* Intel Open Source License.
* MPL - Mozilla Public License.
* Public Domain.
* Python 2.1.1 or newer.
* Ruby license.
* X11 License.
* etc.
There's more, but I've just picked the more common ones.
In addition, GPLV3 is compatible with Apache 2.0, but not the older GPLV2 license which the Linux kernel still uses. One of the big reasons for updating the GPL to version 3 was to make it compatible with the Apache license. GNU recommends Apache 2.0 over a BSD/MIT style license because it deals with patent issues (which GPLV3 also addressed in its own update).
The things that usually tend to make licenses incompatible with GPL are those which have more restrictions. For example, the Eclipse License says that the EPL is governed by the laws of New York. The US isn't the whole world and you're not allowed to impose a restriction like that on GPL software. A lot of the "corporate" open source licenses have clauses like that, which quite frankly makes them pretty useless to anyone other than the original author. There are other explanations at the above web site as well.
Another good example is the original JSON license had a clause which said: “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” That made it non-GPL compatible because you have the right under the GPL to use the software for evil if that is what you want. That might sound like nit-picking, but these are the sorts of details which compatibility can fall down over.
However the big licenses today are GPL, MIT (BSD), Apache, and MPL. MIT and MPL are compatible with versions 2 and 3 of the GPL, and Apache is compatible with version 3 of the GPL.
So yes, CDDL is not compatible with GPL, but it's not because there is anything exceptional about the GPL itself.
@oldtaku - "Practically, it'd be more productive if everyone got together and worked in perfect harmony on the UberFileSystem."
Well, there's also the thing that there's no one size fits all file system either. File systems that work best on large file servers can be excessively resource hungry on PCs. File systems that work best on PCs don't have all the advanced features or performance for large file servers. Systems like ZFS or BTRFS tend to take up to take huge gobs of RAM to run properly and that's probably inherent to the features which people want to use them in.
The article and the original post don't say is what applications they are targeting with Bcachfs. What I would like to see is a replacement for Ext4 before that file system runs out of steam due to increasing disk size. Things like checksumming are important with large disks because of how long it takes to run a conventional scan on them. Right now the plan seems to be for BTRFS to replace Ext4, but I'm not sure that's the right decision.
@bazza - The reason why cameras and other such things use FAT is because Windows already has FAT without having to load a special driver. There's lots of other files systems already available which are more suited to the application from a technical standpoint, but Microsoft has no incentive to include anything which would improve compatibility with other operating systems. Thus, we are stuck with FAT.
@Richard_L - The CDDL license used by ZFS was carefully crafted to make it incompatible with the license used by Linux. Sun was trying to establish OpenSolaris as a major open-source OS, and didn't want people to simply take the best bits of it (basically ZFS and Dtrace) and stick them into Linux. That would have killed OpenSolaris as there would have been no reason for most people to use it.
http://www.cnet.com/news/sun-open-source-license-could-mean-solaris-linux-barrier/
"The CDDL is not expected to be compatible with the GPL, since it contains requirements that are not in the GPL," Claire Giordano of Sun's CDDL team said in its submission. "Thus, it is likely that files released under the CDDL will not be able to be combined with files released under the GPL to create a larger program."
ZFS on BSD was likely not considered a problem, because the user base of BSD is so much smaller.
Can you say that Hammer2 is any more complete, or even as complete, as Bcachefs? Bcachefs isn't just starting out. As the developer says, it has grown out of work done at Google over a number of years on caching data on SSDs. This announcement is simply to say that it is now becoming a stand alone file system rather than just a cache for other file systems.
Overall, it sounds very interesting. It might eventually make a good replacement for ext4 on desktops and laptops. However, adoption of new file systems tends to be slow, because rarely change their file systems.
P.S. - I wasn't the one who down-voted you by the way.
@LAGMonkey - "My impression at the moment is that the Liberals are the equivalent of the left, NDP the center and the Conservatives are the right."
Not exactly. The Liberals are the "centre", the NDP are the "left", and the Conservatives are the "right". However, the left isn't by and large very left, and the right isn't by and large very right. Everyone is really more or less centre. Mulcair started out as a Liberal, and so far as I can see he didn't have to change his opinions on anything to join and lead the NDP. His former boss (premier) in provincial politics was Jean Charest, who switched from being the leader of the federal Conservative Party to being the head of the provincial Liberal Party when he jumped the other way in politics. I could name loads of other very senior members of all three parties who jumped from one party to another at various times.
However, left, right, and centre are not really that useful of a definition in Canadian politics. The Liberals for example don't even pretend to have any ideology other than being the party of sound budgetary management, competent management, and "knowing what is best for the country". If that sounds a bit arrogant, well that arrogance is what tends to get them kicked out of power on a regular basis until the voters have forgiven them. Aside from that, their nickname has been "the natural governing party". I just googled that phrase, and the top hits all refer to the Liberal Party of Canada.
I said before though, politics in Canada tends to be more about personalities than policy. A lot of traditional Conservatives hate Harper and what he has done to their party. They don't consider him to be a "real" Conservative, since he came into the party via a merger with the Reform Party (which had a name change to Canadian Alliance before the merger). This is where you see the references to "Reform-a-Cons" - implying a distinction between the traditional Tories and the much disliked "Reformers". Even some of the original Reform Party members didn't seem to like Harper or his associates much. Here's Deb Grey 10 years ago on retiring from politics (the Conservatives were not yet in power) - look at the section from 1:18 to about 2:15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMUb2Dkji6k
She does not sound very thrilled with the then new leadership.
@Jeff Lewis - "I've run into people who think the fact that we have a Queen is so 'quaint' and that apparently, the Queen is just waiting to take over Canada and turn it back into a colony"
You might simply answer them by saying that Her Majesty the Queen is our head of state, so she's already "taken us over". Whatever it is she was planning on doing, I imagine she's probably already done it.
Ask your American acquaintances how many woman presidents they've had thus far. None they say? How quaint. When they've had women presidents for a long a proportion of their country's existence as we've had Queens in Canada, then they can talk about "quaint" social attitudes.
@Henry Wertz 1 - "So, the Liberals and Conservatives are both supporting a Canadian surveillance state, and NDP opposing."
Only certain parts of bill C-51 are controversial, the rest is not. The government has an absolute majority and can pass any legislation it wants. The Liberals took the tactical position of voting for the bill while stating that they would remove or change the unpalatable bits if they were elected to government. That decision was made simply to take the wind out of the sails of Conservative attacks on them. The Conservatives have been focusing their attacks on the Liberals, and were all wound up to jump on them over the issue and were left looking rather deflated when the Liberals took the position they did.
However, the NDP opposed the bill due to those controversial parts, and they have probably benefited from that clear stance. The Liberals are if anything masters of expediency, but it seems the NDP have benefited in this instance from taking a position of principle.
During the provincial election in Alberta the polls regularly showed the NDP as winning. The conclusion the pollsters, the press, and the pundits drew from that was that the polls must be wrong, because everyone knew that the Conservatives were going to win, and that it was inconceivable that the NDP could win. Instead, they talked about how disturbing it was that the polls could be so wrong, and so consistently wrong. We may be entering a new era they said, an era where we can no longer trust the polls because changes in society were making it more difficult for pollsters to gauge the true opinions of the populace. And this must be so, because everyone knew that it was laughable to even think that the Conservatives could lose, and the NDP of all parties win. And then the NDP won, just like the polls said they would.
As for the federal NDP, there is something that ought to be mentioned about their leader, Thomas Mulcair. He was a Liberal cabinet minister when he was in provincial politics in Quebec. When he left provincial politics, both the federal Conservatives and the federal Liberals tried to recruit him. However, he joined the NDP and later took over as leader when the very popular and highly regarded Jack Layton suddenly and unexpectedly died.
So, if Mulcair was considered to be quite acceptable to all three parties, there can't exactly be a huge ideological gap between them despite what Conservative propaganda might say. And quite frankly, there isn't. Politics in Canada is more about personalities than ideologies, which is why MPs cross the floor so regularly. You know like how the BQ, the leading "socialist" party in Quebec (before the NDP recently destroyed them) was formed by a faction of the Conservatives who split off over egos and personality conflicts in cabinet (Mulroney versus Bouchard)?
Oh and Trevor? You forgot to mention that if/when the Conservatives get the boot this autumn, it's all over the press that Doug Ford secretly wants to take over the leadership of the party. Ha ha ha ha! I'm really, really, looking forward to that campaign, especially when his brother Rob pitches in to help him out. It's going to be comedy gold!
"a collaboration with Docker to enable the same tools to manage containers on both Windows and Linux."
If I understand this correctly, it's just that you can use Docker management tools on Windows, not that you can run any of the actual standard Docker container packages. I suppose that makes sense, as Microsoft hasn't done anything that would enable the actual containerised packages run on Windows.
So, it remains to be seen how many people will bother to make, test, and debug container packages for Windows Server as well as for Linux.
@Lars - They're not just announcing Ubuntu support, they're announcing a Linux-only mainframe that also happens to run Ubuntu. For IBM, it's the new mainframes (two models) that is the centre of their announcement. I believe that up to know they've only supported Linux in an isolated VM (LPAR) on the side, not as the main OS.
They're also claiming that if you install a large system it will cost you half as much as running the workload on a public cloud. So, it looks to me as if they intend to undercut public cloud on price for large customers. That's an interesting answer to those who say that mainframes are too expensive and everything should move to AWS.
As to why someone would want to run Linux rather than Z/OS, there's a huge selection of open source software which will run on Linux, and porting that to Z/OS would be an impossibly large effort for IBM. Of the stuff they have ported to Z/OS, many are very old and unsupported versions (e.g. Python 2.4). By using Linux, the applications gap between x86 and Z/OS almost completely disappears.
In other words, is IBM's plan to make the mainframe becomes a fully modern competitive platform again, rather than just a slowly dying legacy system for old COBOL programs? If so, then that's worth knowing about.
I just had a look at Canonical's (Ubuntu) web site to see their version of the announcement, and apparently this will include things like the Ubuntu cloud management software (Juju) and their container system (LXD - which they seem to pitch as a sort of hybrid hypervisor/container). It's not "cloud" in the sense of putting all your stuff on AWS, but rather "cloud" in the sense of rapid and easy deployment and management of thousands of Linux VMs and containers on IBM hardware using software tools already familiar to people managing Linux systems.
I also had a look at IBM's video of the announcement. They talked a lot about how mainframe design, especially the dedicated IO processors gave their hardware much more usable capacity than an equivalent x86 system. They also talked in terms of how many hundreds of VMs and tens of thousands of containers it can run.
I'm going to take a guess that IBM will be pitching their hardware to companies that would otherwise be buying loads of x86 servers in consolidated data centres. Running Linux as the OS could let IBM cut the price of the hardware without cutting their own throats in terms of pricing with legacy customers. It will also let IBM offer the huge selection of software which is available off the shelf for Linux distros. It would be interesting to know just how the two options (x86 server versus mainframe) will compare.
The strategy behind this might be something that could use more investigation, as it may be signalling where IBM sees the future of the mainframe going rather than just being another option.
"Alibaba and Yandex joining these open source efforts confounds their home nations' occasionally-expressed intentions to build technology ecosystems less dependent on US companies."
Xen originated in the UK (although XenSource was later bought by Citrix), and OpenBSD is based in Canada (in Calgary - nearly neighbours to Trevor Pott in Edmonton). Fast rising web server Nginx is Russian.
I'm not sure how any of this "confounds" any intentions of becoming less dependent on US companies. If anything, it aids it in that Russian and Chinese companies can compete more directly with US companies in their domestic markets and abroad on a more even playing field, because they now have a voice in major open source projects - projects which are worked on by people from around the world by the way.
Russian programmers are already involved in many open source projects. The Chinese are the ones who have been strangely absent thus far. If Chinese programmers get more involved in major projects, then I suspect that this will help provide Chinese companies with more influence in the direction those projects take.
I know there are many flaws in the Alexa rankings, but if we look at them anyway, of the top 25 global web sites, 6 are owned by Chinese companies, and 2 are owned by Russian companies. The rest are American, with not a single EU company anywhere to be seen in the top 25. I would say that the Russians and the Chinese seem to be doing very well in adapting to new technology, and the world already looks a lot less American dominated when viewed from where they're standing.
"If Redmond can knock off those literal rough edges, there's no reason the Surface Hub won't see others inside a business smile."
Other than being massively expensive and having no real advantage in a meeting over a projector? Yes, let's design something that requires me to stand in front of it in order to interact with it, thus obscuring the display from the audience. Truly an idea worthy of Balmer (and apparently now Sadnads).
It might make a good novelty display system in the lobby of certain hotels or convention centres. However, that's a very limited market. A small specialist manufacturer might make a good, if obscure, business out of something like this, but as a division of a business the size of Microsoft it's pointless.
To add a bit of context to the story, in the Canadian press it was stated that police were responding to complaints that someone was wandering about the beach with a pistol. Until they had determined otherwise, they had to take the report seriously. They did however recognise the item as a phone case when they saw it.
As for disposing of it "safely", what they meant was to smash it up with a hammer before tossing it in the garbage bin, as they didn't want to have their time wasted again if some other half wit picked it out of the bin and started using it himself.
Mine's the one with the phone that cost less than some of the idiotic iPhone cases people buy.
It's a standard MS Windows feature (Microsoft Windows Platform Binary Table) which Lenovo is making use of. The Lenovo software isn't loading itself. It simply sits in flash and lists itself as being available. MS Windows looks to see if it's there, and if so copies it onto the hard drive and executes it. It's an alternative to injecting the software directly into the install image. The documentation isn't clear, but I imagine that it was meant to allow enterprise IT staff to use their own generic Windows install images but still automatically provision the vendor specific stuff.
If you installed Linux (e.g. Ubuntu) then the bits would simply sit there as there is no equivalent feature in Linux. The same obviously applies to BSD. It requires an active effort by the OS to load. The "rootkit" stories are a bit off target, in that it isn't something which is hidden from the OS. Rather it's a standard Windows feature which not many people were aware of.
I would not be surprised if many other PC makers were doing the same thing, especially for their business oriented models. The only thing Lenovo may be doing is using it for more things than Microsoft had originally planned.
Generally though, I think the feature was a bit of a bad idea by Microsoft to begin with. There's no guarantee that the software being loaded from the flash chips will be compatible with future versions of Windows, and there's no obvious provision for updating it when installing the new version of Windows. More than a few people would toss out the PC after scratching their heads for a while and then assuming there was some mysterious hardware incompatibility with Windows.
What you're looking for is called "coreboot". It is open source, it's GPL so vendors can't add some proprietary "extra sauce" without releasing the source (and therefore letting us know what they did), and it does the minimum necessary to boot the OS and then gets out of the way. If you just want to run Linux, then it can boot GRUB 2 directly without any BIOS or EFI, which will then boot your Linux distro. If you want to run an "other OS", then you can use a BIOS (Seabios) or EFI (TianoCore) equivalent, and then boot the OS via that mechanism.
Ironically, the Coreboot web site says that it works on at least 10 models of Lenovo laptop and it ships as the standard firmware on a Lenovo Chromebook.
I'm not a big fan of large complex firmware systems in PCs. Large complex software systems will inevitably have bugs and security holes, and PC hardware vendors are poorly placed to deal with them. I would rather they just booted the OS with a minimum of fuss and let it get on with things. The OS vendors at least are used to dealing with security problems and have established procedures and update channels.
I stopped installing Flash on my own PC years ago, at least a decade. I don't miss it. A lot of web sites simply detect if you don't have Flash and use a different format. For the very, very, few that don't, there's nothing in Flash on those sites that I would care about anyway.
Before Youtube switched to not using it (it was phased out slowly), I used to use a video downloader program to simply download the videos and play them locally instead of in the browser. It's been a while since I've had to do that though.
The positive side of this was that I've seen nothing of the Flash ads that everyone is always complaining about. I've had 90% of the benefit of ad blocking without having to block ads. The negative side of the anti-Flash campaign is that a very small number of ad vendors have started using HTML5 to do the sort of annoying ads that they typically use Flash for. When the ad vendors drop Flash, I will be very sad indeed. I hope that browser vendors will take this into account and give people the opportunity to block third-party animations and video without having to block "normal" ads.
@Lost all faith... - "how badly are these companies development teams run?"
It may have had nothing to do with the development teams. In fact I would be surprised if it had anything to do with the development teams.
More likely the problem is in the financial/marketing/management process. Developers - "We need to get rid of Active-X because it will be obsolete in a couple of years". Word down from upon high - "Your request is denied because you cannot prove to our satisfaction that this will provide the synergies to drive the target ROI, EBITDA, and AOYNFIOX (we heard that last one at a management seminar last week so we added to the list)".
It's even worse if that part of the product line is outsourced to someone in India. The Indian shop are not going to lift a finger unless the meter is running ("not in the original contract? not our problem mate unless you pay extra"), and the product manager at the customer may not have a clue what ActiveX is or whether they use it.
Oh, there's loads of software companies in the industrial sector who are still flogging ActiveX and Silverlight as being the very latest and greatest web technology, and releasing new products based on them. And this is for stuff that I've done with HTML5 (or even XHTML 4) and Javascript, not something exotic. I expect to see many more wails and tears from people who willingly ignored the writing on the wall despite having been told repeatedly they were investing in dead-end technology.
@handle - "Oh, and is there any way to restart Firefox without it forgetting all its tabs, apart from "killall firefox" or other unorthodox ways of terminating the application?"
Just quit normally (e.g. ctrl-Q), and then when you restart it select History ==> Restore Previous Session. It will open up all the previous tabs and windows and start you off in the same place as before you quit. It doesn't render each tab until you switch to it to avoid the "thundering herd" problem, and if you were logged in to a web site you might have to log in again, but other than that there's no difference from where you were before.
If you just want a few specific selected tabs re-opened, look in the History ==:> Recently Closed Tabs menu, where it keeps a handful of your more recent tabs and will restore any (or all) of those if you select them.
@Vector - "Yeah, and it'll really suck if anyone ever poisons one of those third party repos"
Well they can do that right now, can't they? The existing proprietary custom updaters would pull the poisoned application updates down just as well as a hypothetical Microsoft updater would. The suggestion has nothing to do with solving the existing security problems of the vendor's servers. It's simply about simplifying the software running on the client and making it easier to use. If the client software is less painful to use, more people will keep their software security patches up to date.
@Gordon - The sandboxing you describe is the direction that Ubuntu seems to be heading in as a by product of their mobile efforts. It's not really for security purposes though, it's for user privacy and control of user data. It is intended to allow people to download things like proprietary games from an "app store" without giving those apps access to all of a user's system.
However, that model won't apply to everything. The normal "standard" stuff from Ubuntu's repos will still be installed and run the traditional way. It's mainly to limit the damage that can be done by a malicious or incompetent third party proprietary software.
@AC - "This means you can update your entire OS and *all* applications with one command/click."
Exactly. There's one updater, it runs on a schedule I can set, I decide where it gets its updates from, it batches up different updates together so I can run them all at once, and I can set different schedules for checking for security and routine updates if I wish, or even turn off everything except security updates. I can even turn off new OS version upgrades (something else Microsoft seems to need to learn).
I can even set up my own repos on my own network, and just point the updater on each PC at that. This supposedly super-enterprise feature is the bog standard method which Linux distros have been using for decades.
@AC - "I suspect they're most of the way there with the Windows Store, they just need users to be installing applications from the store rather than random sites/discs for it to apply. "
With Ubuntu (and most Linux distros no doubt), the same updater will also work with third party repos. I'm not limited to just the Ubuntu repos ("app store"). All I need to do is to add the third party repos to the list. There's nothing special about the distro's own repos in that sense.
So I think that Microsoft needs to not just update from their own "app store", they also need to let users add third parties such as Mozilla, Adobe, or whomever, and get updates from those third party servers as well. Linux distros have been doing this for years, and there's no need for Microsoft to have a monopoly on this service. Indeed making Microsoft store apps the only source would simply take us right back to the same problem, since everyone else would be forced to run their own updaters to avoid giving Microsoft a cut of their revenues.
For Microsoft, substitute Apple if you're using one of their brand of PCs. It's the same problem in either case.
I'm using Ubuntu and the update notice popped up in the left hand launcher bar just before this story came up in my RSS news feed after I turned my computer on. Two clicks later and I was brought up to the latest version while I was skimming through and marking out other news stories to read. Utterly painless.
This is one of the nice things about using a mainstream Linux distro. All updates come in ASAP, not a month later, and they go through one easy to an use update interface which handles the item affected plus any third party dependencies as well.
Linux distros have done this right, and it's something that Microsoft and Apple really need to copy. If they did, then more people would keep their software updated properly, and we wouldn't have the horrific update system in Windows with 57 different third party custom updaters running in the toolbar all fighting with each other and flinging annoying pop ups at you every 5 minutes.
As for this specific vulnerability, it sounds like someone is trying to mass-harvest developer passwords to various developer oriented accounts and servers.
Well, the previous judge turned out to have been a programmer who went back to law school before becoming a judge. He said that Oracle's case was rubbish, and laughed at Oracle's claims about the importance and uniqueness of some of their code.
Now these appeal judges have just said otherwise. I imagine it will go through a series of appeal processes for a while though.
The really big problem is going to be what all the legal trolls at other companies are going to do with the ruling. It will be like patent trolling with the dial cranked up to 11 as this principle gets applied generally to everything relating to software, hardware, and medicine.
It's the standard language used for writing apps, much like Objective C is for Apple phones. A lot, if not most, of the Google provided apps are probably written in the language as well.
Now a lot of stuff is also written in things like C++, or uses HTML5 and Javascript wrapped up in a container (e.g. cross platform apps that also run on Apple phones do this), so not everything uses the Java language, but there is a lot that does.
However, it's not Oracle's Java that is used. Google (or rather the company that Google bought) wrote their own from scratch, designed around running under the very limited resources phones had back when Android was being designed.
It doesn't even use a Java VM. Instead, the Java byte code gets cross compiled to a different format designed specifically for mobile platforms. That's the basis of Oracle's complaint that "Google has intentionally made sure Android apps won't run on a plain-vanilla Java virtual machine". Google very carefully doesn't call their system "Java" to avoid stepping on Oracle's trademarks. It uses the Java language, but it isn't a Java system.
Any effort to purge the Java language from Android faces the problem of the huge amount of existing software written using it. However, I think it is eminently doable within a couple of years, especially if automatic translation tools are provided. The corner cases involving third party apps that won't or can't be ported to a different language could be handled by telling those app vendors to purchase an Oracle license for a run-time that would get bundled with their app.
On the other hand, the issue is supposedly the APIs, or rather the library headers and library function names that are at question, rather than the Java language. I suppose it might be possible to simply rename all the functions and then mechanically translate the source code so that it isn't the same as what Oracle's Java uses. A lot of the libraries are probably fairly thin wrappers around the underlying Linux C libraries anyway. It would probably be possible to put out a tool which goes through the source code and does this automatically (a big "sed" script might do it, but I wouldn't want to trust myself not to screw that up). If they get rid of the Java APIs and call straight to the C APIs, then Oracle's complaint collapses.
If that sounds silly, well I think the whole thing is silly to begin with. Oracles case relies on a whole new theory of copyright. The other thing to think about is that I suspect the actual ownership of these "new theory" copyrights may be a complete mess along the lines of AT&T's lawsuit against BSD a few decades ago. A lot of the ideas of the newer features in Java probably came in from the community. AT&T's case against BSD collapsed when eventually it was discovered that a lot of the code that AT&T thought they owned turned out to have been written by third parties in a sort of informal open source manner.
If Oracle succeeds completely though, I am pretty sure that other languages will be under threat, even if Oracle doesn't go after them right away. All programming languages borrow from each other, and I know of several (to remain nameless to avoid FUD) who took things like concurrent futures from Java with the explicit intention of making their implementation similar to Java's in order to limit bikeshedding when adopting it. If Oracle succeeds, then anything using those features will come under a cloud until those features are ejected from the language. When that happens, Java programmers will find themselves treated like lepers by everyone else. That's not a good result.
"do modern day storage tests accurately reflect what end users find valuable in products such as HCI?"
This is exactly what I was thinking. To bring an analogy in, I'm working on a project which while it has nothing to do with HCI, is entirely performance related. There are about a 100 different aspects to it. I wrote benchmarks for it, and I could cherry pick results of anywhere from 20% faster to 300 times faster from them. Anything from the entire range of numbers is valid, depending upon what the user wants to do with it. I ended up just picking an arithmetic average of all of them, and listing all of the results in a table in the documentation. There's really no one right answer.
We see something similar from the web browser Javascript wars. Each vendor has their own set of benchmarks where their browser does particularly well. It's not just that each vendor is puffing up their browser. It's also because each of them has a different idea of what features really matter and they create benchmarks which reflect those different visions and direct optimisation efforts in that direction.
I can imagine that with HCI, there are many, many, different aspects to it, with different visions of what matters most to the market they are trying to address. Sometimes one really big user or client will use their megaphone to get the things they want pushed forward, even if they don't matter to everyone else.
I would not be surprised of what really mattered most in the HCI market is a good balance of features and ease of administration, rather than just raw performance numbers.
Perhaps Trevor could do an article on the benchmarks in question, and how well what they tested reflected the sorts of things which customers actually cared about.
It's simple. Just draw your diagram to support the status quo and then dream up reasons why it ought to be that way. Gartner customers don't want guidance on what they ought to do in future. They want weighty looking reports they can wave around in budget meetings to justify why they spent so much money on IT infrastructure last year for so little result.
Gartner will start recommending Nutanix when most of their customers are already using Nutanix and are looking for justifications for that decisions.
According to the Canadian press, the US did not want Canada in the talks to begin with, and has been talking about kicking Canada out. Their plan apparently was to negotiate a treaty with the weaker countries and then present it to Canada with an ultimatum to sign as is "or else". Last week saw various threats in the form of press leaks from the US directed at Canada, with Canada responding "we don't negotiate through the media".
Currently, the NDP is ahead in the polls, so the current Canadian government may be out on their ear come election day. Should that happen, I would be very surprised to see the NDP sign the treaty.
There's a lot of talk about how big the economic area covered by this treaty is. However, the bulk of the economies involved are already covered by existing free trade treaties. If the TPP collapses, it would be no great loss.
@Christian Berger - "If Google wouldn't have used something Java-ish for Android the whole problem wouldn't exist."
This particular court case might not exist, but the potential for another one involving different parties would. The fundamental issue is the way this particular American court is choosing to interpret American copyright law.
Of course the whole thing will be moot if the court decides that it comes under "fair use" (as the Americans call it) provisions. Oracle will still own the copyrights to the APIs, but everyone else can use them without buying a license from Oracle.
Failing that though, this will have opened up a real can of worms, as lawyers for all sorts of companies start trawling through their own APIs and seeing who they can squeeze money out of.
Come on Google, dump the Java APIs and just use the native Linux ones directly. It's the APIs for the libraries and OS interfaces, not the language itself which are at issue here. Android apps aren't meant to be portable anyway. You've got at least a year to do it in before the trial can come to any sort of conclusion. You can probably even provide a utility which will automatically translate app source code API calls to the native Linux ones, and probably even do the same for the binaries, so the "legacy apps" transition problem doesn't have to be a big issue.
That won't keep Oracle from demanding a big cheque for past API infringement if they win, but it will stop them from demanding royalties on new systems in future. It will also give them a big kick in the goolies, as Android has brought a lot of new developers into the Java language and increased the value of the overall Java ecosystem. Remember the baboon who danced about screaming "developers, developers, developers"? He wasn't entirely wrong about that. Anything which diminishes Java as a language for mobile apps would be a massive loss of prestige for Oracle, and might even make their shareholders pay attention to what is being done in their name.
Sun was fine to deal with, but the only thing that will make Oracle smarten up is a slap across the face with a wet kipper. A big win for Oracle in this case will just whet their appetite for finding ways of screwing over Java developers everywhere else. Make them think they have to work to keep customer loyalty, and they just might change their attitude a bit.
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