Stranger43

I am wondering how much of this is fueled by the change in the word alien from simply meaning foreign to meaning extraterrestrial and people misreading the former for the latter.

The research into foreign weapon technology is in one of those gray areas where not only does some of those activities border really close to industrial espionage against companies in potentially allied countries, or might contradict stated US State Department positions on international law it's usually classified and spoken off in hushed tones

It's very likely that an alien(as in foreign) technology evaluation program exists without there being anything extra-terrestrial about it as legalese can trail popular changes to terms by several decades. And that mentions of those in wider circles might fuel some rumors and misconceptions among those "who wants to believe".

Read Wealth of Nations for an explanation of why this might not be the disaster for the wealthy countries as most mercantlists think it will.

Basically what's likely to happen in the long term is that shipping high skill jobs oversees will increase the world market size to a point where it's not going to actually leed to poverty in the rich regions.

Even the much hated exit of manufacturing jobs to Asia did not leed to an quantifiable decline in living standards in America as a whole and exiting the EU is not leading to an rise in working class wages across Britain.

With sensible management increasing industrial activity in the poorer regions can actually happen without a whole lot of negative side effect for the wealthy regions, but that require an kind of rational, fact based policy making that the current western political culture cannot produce as emotional irationalism seems to be an far better way to get elected then calm rationalism.

Not directly but it might cause some upstream vendors and projects to rethink weather they want to recommend Red Hat as preferred platform and if the hosting vendors turn off the Red Hat clones that's going to ripple back to Red Hat, as a lot of corporate linux users will gravitate to the distro that's recommended by the application vendors.

Part of how canonical challenged Red Hat is that they deliberately made it really easy for a developer to run Ubuntu on their workstation and test environments.

No but it gives every customer the right to redistribute the sourcecode to software they bought if that code is covered by the GPL under the same terms as RedHat got from their upstream.

It looks like RedHat might be trying to avoid that clause by threatening to stop selling any software to people who might use that part of the GPL.

How bad is the new freemium model making things, i kind of fizzled out on playing EVE about a decade ago(life happened) and is wondering if the game is worth getting back into?

But the same can be said about waterfall, every buzzword process have one success story and that one story will then be used to invalidate every failure, which is not really an useful way to look at it.

The problem is that by now more people have failed at agile then succeeded and instead of going back and modifying or challenging the universality of agile they way it happened with waterfall, people keep doubling down on the universality of "The Agile Manifesto" by discounting any failure as "no true agile".

The problem with "The Agile Manifesto" and the cargo cult that arose around it, is that while the manifesto pretty accurately described what a lot of people felt was wrong with the "Civil Engineering" approach to software development it never represented an reliable methodology for how to actually fix those problems.

This is why we keep seeing those "no true scotsman argument" against any real world attempt to "be agile" where no failure can ever be seen as an argument against the usefulness of "The Agile Manifesto", and it's not really a new or surprising process but something that happens to most movements created around a loose manifesto.

What will change things for the better is pragmatism based on observations and currently thats not the way the Agile movement seems to be moving.

To me it's kind of obvious that Edge exists to promote bing/msn/homail i.e. it's there because without a way to push windows/Office users to those sites/services MS web presence is going to be basically nothing.

Does this mean that old microsoft is back?

We all know that edge is a thing because it's being tied into windows as the default browser for opening links in a way thats hard to permanently disable, so it's basically the behavior they got fined over with IE back in the old days.

Firefox is still around.

As is Brave and Opera but i do recomend that people look deeper into their owners before blindly trusting them.

As the main codebases are mostly open it still a competitive market once you look at the edges as the small browsers are still viable for day to day use.

The EU was designed by paranoid lawyers and diplomats rather then the naive idealists that made most national constitutions, which makes it both very hard to love and brutally effective at producing legislation that don't crumble the second someone devious start to look for loopholes.

Normally internet only flame wars like the vim/emacs ones break out because they are fun so in that case everyone does.

I suspect what your describing is less the cause but a symptom of the real case.

In my experience(i have worked from branch offices most my career) the differentiating factor is literacy, ie how comfortable/confident are the organization with recorded text vs private spoken word and the more the organization writes the more effective the remote staff will be.

And one of the side effect of a written culture is that a lot of the informal conventions/conversations become formal structure so the same level of top down planning can look very differently based on weather the culture for disseminating it is literate or oral.

because none of them did long term statistical modeling or risk evaluation but kept focusing only a few quarters ahead.

No in this case it's probably a case of them holding too many low interest bonds and being dependent on markets that are in trouble for "profits" meaning that they are probably going to eat capital rather then pay dividends for a long time to come(companies can loose stock value without going bankrupt overnight).

The world changed dramatically over the last few years and that's going to hit some sectors harder then others and the sectors that's hurting the most is finance and tech so the companies that have huge exposure to both and not a lot of assets in energy, food and infrastructure is probably going to see losses in the years to come.

There a bubble bursting right now as people are realizing that the "not yet made it" startups that got founded doing the age of cheap money is probably not going to make it into profitable enterprises in the current climate of increasing inflation and the resulting reduction in spending by almost all types of consumers.

This mean that just about any financial organization dependent on the success of the American startup sector for profits is at risk.

And yet were required by society to subscribe to the prevalent narrative as a mark of our loyalty/respectability within whatever group we operate.

And that requirement is getting more and more enforced by more and more groups as the old social contracts are collapsing as a consequence of global changes nobody feels in control of and a lot of people aren't ready to deal with.

And as blind group loyalty is fundamentally irrational it's no longer necessary or even desirable for the accepted narrative to conform to any kind of standard for logical coherence and accordance with the observed reality, as accepting it more about showing your commitment to the group/nation/party/movement then it is about it being true, or useful for guiding behavior and decisions.

This is where we get today's problem there simply is no tolerance for any grayzones where we dont know what is right and true where big interest are at play so we cannot really have a rational open search for the truth in those area. And once you accept this for the big ticket items it's hard to then require rationality in the areas where it might still be allowed societal pressures.

The problem is not that there is no one person it's that the team that knows the details are insulated from end users by layers of layers of bureaucracy needed to keep them from being flooded in identical/trivial tickets to the point where they never get to look at the actual product they are developing.

With smaller outfit's the L2 tech support might actually be having a line of communication directly to engineering, where in large companies there might be an L3-6 plus different product owners and escalation managers involved before a case gets in front of the engineering team.

Because nobody got fired for buying Microsoft.

Enterprise IT is conservative and full of strange politics that make it really dangerous for an admin team or it department to stick their head out and do something independent other then follow the "mythical industry best practice" and MS is extremely good at manipulating what gets considered "industry best practice" to their advantage and then give just enough discount on the more visible parts of the costs to look cheaper.

And it's a open secret that individual employee productivity don't matter all that much in the kind of back end work where a PC was ever a feasible tool, as what really counts for profitability is the non-pc using frontline staff's productivity, who is far more likely to be issued either no computers or mobile phones or tablet then wintel laptops.

That could have been true if the industry had not screwed up IPv6 and security so badly that it's actually rare for even good internet connections to expose their end users to full inbound internet traffic so it's actually harder to self host out of your basement today then it was 20 years ago because of the prevalence of ISP supplied hardware firewalls for todays consumer internet.

What cloud gets you is the ability to put your data/workload right at the core without having to make special deals with your local isp, and with a lot more resilience then you would likely afford unless your at least at the multiple 20 foot container full of servers scale of compute need.

The big problem for server operations is not the damned servers but all of the infrastructure you need to keep them running, like power cooling network/storage and internet connectivity.

The cloud is not easy but damn trying to get cooling and power efficiency of an small server room anywhere near the efficiency levels most big data-center publish is next to impossible as is multi vendor internet connectivity.

With the cloud all of that kind of goes away as it's managed by whatever data-center operator that cloud is running on but what people forget is that that is also true for old fashioned colocation services which is often offering a better cost/value then cloud.

And while it's definitely harder to manage stuff like AWS or Azure because it bleeds a lot of abstractions small scall vpc providers hide from you or that you dont really get with a single home server, it's not hard on the scale of having to run a couple of racks worth of vmware servers with SAN based storage.

The counterculture of the day is the MAGA movement they have their own reality and is begging for a fight, until someone shows up to give them one and is basically an text book example on an co-dependent counterculture that cannot exist without the mainstream culture existing as something to counter.

I know it's kind of tipping the debate on the head to suggest that the counterculture is not the "future left" but the "3rd way right" but there is nothing in the mechanics of mainstream to counterculture that suggest that the challenge to the mainstream have to come from the traditional left.

And like the Hippies of the(mostly post civil rights movement) counterculture the maga trumpets are only tangentially linked to any concrete actionable goals as it's about a return to the past that never was without any real clear idea of what that's supposed to look like only that they personally will be bigshots once it happens.

What is however increasingly clear is that the traditional left have been hunted into extinction by both the radical centrist mainstream and the right-wing counterculture as neither of those movement's have any real appetite for the old optimistic "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" values of the enlightenment, but prefers stability through authority as a response to an world they mostly don't understand.

It's usually a cost decision and AWS don't really care about anything smaller then say the US government enough to even attempt to engage in competitive bidding proposals so if a company/organization put out an RFP MS usually finds a way to look cheaper then AWS.

Add to that that AWS dont really engage in the normal business to business sales process but simple gives you a price list and tells you "thats what it costs" pretty much straight up and it's no surprise a lot of traditional enterprises with huge existing Microsoft bills end up with the vendor they know, understand and think they can control.

It's not that there is anything really wrong with AWS their support is good their products work but it's a messy platform where you really need to pay attention and might even engage with consultant to fully understand what your paying for and how optimization decisions is affecting your ROI as everything is priced individually in AWS where as Azure does a bit more bundling into packages.

It's a partial network error pretty much globally with azure https://status.azure.com/(which occasionally shows a 504 right now)

Where i work it seems to be a bit hit and miss with some of our branch offices affected but it's not everyone/everywhere so some connectivity is working and some isnt.

HP-UX is kind of an interesting tale in that it's always been underrepresented in the enthusiast community, perhaps because HPE never tried to put up hpux on intanium as an alternative to Linux on proliant, or maybe because it's core market seems to have been in the manufacturing sector where it supplanted hp3000 minicomputers and ran boring logistics software and factory control systems and never really made it big in education, research nor web hosting.

by 2004 HPUX was actually pulling off an successful migration from PA-Risc to Itanium and it lived on profitable for over a decade after that until HPE finally published an Roadmap for when they were going to end HPUX development which is currently scheduled to happen around 2025/26 with the last new itanium systems sold around 2018.

Irix was killed off by windows around the time the pc industry up with SGI's graphics capabilities. And i cant recall what happened to digital's true64(but it never really survived the merger of DEC into first Compaq and then HP).

having gone from Linux to HPUX and now partially back to Linux as the OS i make my money supporting, im not sure the learning gap between Linux and Commercial Unix(tm) is big enough that there was ever a real problem training/recruiting Unix(tm) admins.

I think the the real reason why Linux supplanted commercial Unix(tm) lies in the hardware market, around the time when Linux got good enough to compete directly with commercial Unix on stability we also saw the x86_64 systems getting good enough to complete with Power/Sparc/Itanium based systems on most workloads.

And as the Hardware vendors challenging the commercial Unix market with cheaper Linux boxen, were often the same vendors who sold commercial Unix Boxen, the transition was often managed more then fought.

There is still a fair amount of small business dotNET software being written that kind of require windows server but that's mostly targeting standalone desktop application or spreadsheet abuses, but for anything that needs high end servers and advanced storage in order to meet performance Linux is pretty much all of the market right now.

There is some niche's in the network space where xBSD plus custom asic's plays a role, due to licensing concerns but more and more vendors are finding a way to do something similar with linux.

And as FaaS/CaaS in practice depends on a set of Linux kernel API's those deployments are still Linux clusters underneath all of the obfuscating complexity layers that 90% of people don't actually need, nor benefit from.

I don't think i have ever even heard of an unix to FreeBSD migration being done by an large commercial organization, and there is virtually no commercial enterprise software being certified for FreeBSD.

It's one of those things where nostalgic old Unix admins who's not really ready to embrace the anarchy of the Linux ecosystem is kind of pretending some clean old fashioned alternative exist, and cling to the myth that FreeBSD is more of an Unix(tm) Successor then Linux.

And yes i have also not really heard of greenfield Unix(tm) deployments since maybe 2008 and even then Linux was clearly where most people went when their old custom minicomputer(think DEC PDP 20, AS400 and HP3000) systems had to be replaced by something a bit more standardized.

Insnt the problem that nobody have ever developed an complex system using modern programming languages where

"engineers feels like they have control over the code and are not afraid of doing changes."

And that trying to have it as a goal only results in the project getting fragmented in a messy ball of micro-components(services/classes/libraries) with complex inter dependencies that nobody feels like they have control over the code and are not afraid of doing changes to?

It's almost as if there is no real solution to complexity that avoids having to deal directly with the complexity inherent to a problem domain, and that means developing documentation and testing that allows people to touch/change scary systems.

I think the popularity of the Keurig's(and clones) have a lot to do with the legends about how difficult pour over coffee is along with the fact that American's don't really have electric kettle's nor coffee grinders.

So for the cost of one overpriced toy the Keurigs lets you play at being an coffee snob without really having to learn anything about coffee or how to use an grinder or buy an electric kettle and that speaks to a lot of people.

And we should not forget that if your only experience with manual coffee makers and grinders is watching some internet coffee snob use massively overprized equipment and obsess over every little detail the process of making coffee the old fashined way might seem overwhelming.