chr15p

> Red Hat bought CentOS, presumably with real $$$,

if I remember right technically centos didn't really exist as an entity that could be bought, Red Hat just hired all the developers (there were only ever 3-4 people working on centos). I would guess they are now working on Centos Streams, or have moved on to other things entirely. Its not like Centos has been killed off either, so it didn't cost a lot and this wont really save anything, it's "just" a change of focus.

Microsoft buying ubuntu would be an interesting (and not impossible) move though.

The British Library also has a set of audio clips of computer pioneers from the UK including several with Steve Furber (co-inventor of ARM).

https://www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/themes/designing-and-pro...

"instant-speed trans-Atlantic communication" started with the laying of the first trans-atlantic telegraph cables in the 1860's, and allowed machine to machine communications, messaging, shopping, there are even cases of people marrying after meeting over the telegraph. Radio was in use by the 1920's and a smartphone is basically a personal 2-way radio with pretensions!

I think a lot of modern tech is really just 19th century tech done (a lot) better, smaller, faster, more conveniently, and much more widespread.

> It's still a bit immature in terms of comparison to Chef's server offering (Ansible Tower is pretty useless)

Meh, I really like Tower, but maybe that depends on what you're used to.

> It's not code, so if you want to do something more programmatic, you're going to end up with something ugly

this is true, ansibles DSL has its limits and the developers are pretty clear that there are some things that are too complicated for its yaml based syntax. 99% of use cases its great for, if you want that extra 1% then you have to write your own ansible modules (which is actually reasonably straightforward). I dont know chef but puppet has become more and more complicated over the years chasing the more advanced use cases and in many ways thats moved it away from a tool for sysadmins towards a being a tool for specialists so I think Ansibles outlook makes more sense. YMMV.

THey have slightly different sweet spots, puppet is really good for fixing configuration drift, run it every 30 mins and you know the server will always be in the state you expect.

Ansible tends to be better for jobs you do when a sysadmin wants them done, its really good for scripting repeatable installations, or for doing updates in a consistent fashion on hundreds of machines, adding new users to a bunch of different applications, etc etc.

You can use puppet for ad-hoc jobs, but its not really designed for that it tends to be overly complicated and a bit awkward (imho). You can do drift re-mediation with ansible and run it every 30 mins to fix issues and it will work but its not its real sweet spot.

Personally I would use ansible for both use cases because its simpler, I understand it, and it has a more sysadmin way of thinking, but I know places that use both and that makes sense as well.

IBM was profitable but stagnating, they were already a major reseller of Red Hat, who were growing rapidly, had good tech, lots of potential to grow more, and was already big enough that they may be able to change IBMs numbers by enough to not just get lost in the noise (if you make $8.5+ billion profit changing that by $100million isn't going to get wall street excited)

Someone like MS would buy Canonical for completely different reasons, they're not big enough to effect Microsofts profits in any way, they dont have any really interesting tech, but they do have the Ubuntu brand and control of one of the really big linux distros (the biggest on the desktop) so there might be value in Azure being able to brand itself as the home of Ubuntu ("it runs perfectly on our cloud becuase we write it that way"). To be honest though I dont see that as a big enough thing to make MS risk their reputation as a good place to run Red Hat and openshift. The only other reason to buy Ubuntu would be to kill it, and the political ramifications of that to the open source friendly reputation they've worked hard to build would be bad.

mainframes can run rhel vms which are basically standard rhel installs that you assign RAM/CPU/storage to, with the benefits of mainframe hardware (eg. massive I/O bandwidth) so you can be happy with your mainframe because you are running rhel on it :)

But realistically mainframes are a small part of IBMs business so there are lots of reasons for IBM to buy Red Hat that are entirely unrelated to mainframes or POWER hardware

kinda, I mean, IBM consulting have been happy to move customers off legacy IBM/AIX/DB2 onto Dell kit running Oracle on windows for decades now if thats what the customer wanted and was prepared to pay, precisely because its better to take the services revenue and the reseller margin then lose everything. So that relief well was drilled years ago, and certainly the name IBM helped with persuading those slow conservative orgs to use their services, but this predates the Red Hat acquisition by a looong time. IBM have been a major reseller of RHEL for those migrations for years, this just means they take the software as well as the services revenue, and (they hope) can sell RH software into more of those conservative accounts by bundling it under the IBM family.

Other way round, IBM are hoping that a lot of their customers who aren't already big Red Hat customers can be converted to using RHEL and (especially) Openshift. They already have all the sales and delivery relationships in place that they need to do really big (like 100 million to billion dollar big) deals, much bigger then anything Red Hat has been able to sell on their own. They also have relationships to sell RHEL/Openshift to IBM customers that RH struggled to get through the door of. So if they can get big growth in the number and size of Red Hat deals by selling to their existing customers then they can grow RH massively and of course all growth in Red Hat deals is growth in IBMs profits.

And if they can sell some of them RHEL on POWER9 they will be very happy to take that money as well :)

They've just spent $34billion for what is essentially a culture and a customer base (all the software is open source, and the building are leased), so yes they absolutely can do whatever they want but burning it all to the ground is going to cause some interesting questions about exactly how that increased shareholder value. It could all fall apart but IBM management have a massive incentive to make it work.

34billion is a lot of money to mess around with so hopefully they will at least thing twice before trying anything too dramatic, plus Jim Whitehurst (Red Hat CEO) is going to be reporting directly in to Ginni Rometty (IBM CEO) which should help provide some aircover. In the end it will probably depend on a) Red Hat continuing to grow and make money, because why would you kill a golden goose, and b) how good Jim Whitehurst is at the inevitable corporate politics

This is a whole series of clips from much longer interviews including snippets about working with Alan Turing on the Manchester Mk1, and Tony Hoare talking about the invention of Quicksort

The full interviews are part of the oral history of british science at https://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Science?_ga=2.161461950.26...

On my fedora 29 box:

[root@laptop ~]# which yum

/usr/bin/yum

[root@laptop ~]# ls -l /usr/bin/yum

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 5 Oct 15 12:47 /usr/bin/yum -> dnf-3

Pretty sure "yum" in rhel8 will actually be dnf as well, but keeping the name for backwards compatability

As I understand it there was a new TCP/IP stack added to the linux kernel back somewhere around 2015/2016 that couldn't be backported to the RHEL7 3.10 kernel without breaking the kernel ABI that red hat tries to only change with major versions.

So new to rhel TCP/IP stack not to linux as a whole.

Also if you make hardware absolutely optomised for Lisp then all the C, FORTRAN, and Cobol (this was the 1970's!) programmers aren't particularly interested because it does nothing for their code.

So the Lisp machines were targeting a fairly small segment of the market that might have exploded into the mainstream but didn't, so they had less income to reinvest and therefore struggled to maintain their lead over the general purpose/mass market hardware vendors.

I have been amazed how many really good linux people will close and re-open a file in vim because they dont know how to undo.

Its weird to me how people will spend weeks learning openstack or kubernetes in depth but never think "there must be a way to do this..." or get round to googling a 5 minute basic command tutorial for the text editor they use every day.

A normal sysadmin workflow would be, log in via ssh, poke at some log files, run a couple of commands, edit a config file, restart a service, check the logs again, logout. If you need to be ssh'd in anyway to run commands then being able to edit a file remotely is of limited value.

I actually really like emacs, for a while I used it as my login shell (no x-windows and with e-shell providing a command line), and elisp is an awesome tool (in theory if not always in practice), but when I moved into sysadmining and later consulting the practical issues meant vi was by far the best option.

To be honest I've seen very few linux machines with emacs preinstalled, nano seems to be part of the ubuntu default install (maybe debian too?) but isn't on any fedora box I have immediate access too (it is available in the repos). This might be because I mainly deal in servers with smaller installs than most desktops.

I would entirely agree that a lot of vims popularity lies in it being part of the default install on pretty much every unix box ever though. That and it actually being a decent editor once you get over that initial insert mode/command mode learning curve.

Not just its launch time but its ubiquity, vi comes installed on pretty much every linux/unix machine no matter how minimal the install so if you are a sysadmin whose job involves jumping between machines a lot it makes far more sense to learn vi then install emacs everywhere. Its also the reason to use it without customization so you dont come to rely on a feature that isn't installed on that one machine with a critical problem

Developers tend to work on a single machine so can tailor it much more to their own preferences.

If you're looking for a reasonably technical (but not completely rocket science!) history of the British space programme A Vertical Empire by C. N. Hill is really good, although, as a Brit, also quite depressing as you realise what might have been https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vertical-Empire-History-Programme-1...

> before us only a handful of new banks had been created since Metro bank, and that was the first in 125 years..

I think thats the point of this push by the Bank Of England. UK high street banking was dominated by a handful of huge, old, banks that had to be bailed out during the 2008 banking crisis because pretty much the entire population used them. A larger number of smaller banks reduces the moral hazard around "too big to fail" banks, allows management who cause a bank failure to lose their jobs, their share options, and their company, and reduces the chances of the government having to nearly bankrupt itself to bail them out.

Plus if London wants to continue to be a world centre of finance then encouraging innovative new banks to base there cant exactly do any harm.

> Apart from this - what is the status of the patch, is it redhat-only or is it on its way to the upstream?

I had a conversation with some of the RH kernel devs a few weeks ago and from my (hazy) memory, this comes from Red Hats acquisition of permabit so it was closed source, its now GPL'd but needs a fair amount of tidying up and bits rewriting to get it into a state that the kernel developers would accept it (they reimplemented some standard kernel features so they didn't have to link to GPL'd code). So it will be upstreamed but it will take time.

In the meantime its released for RHEL only, not even in Fedora. Iirc could be ported to other distros (its 100% GPLed) its just not been.

> equality of opportunity is already present

is it? You don't provide any argument to back this up. Legally maybe there are equal opportunities but is does society provide them? And if not should we do something to fix that?

Equality of outcome is a proxy for opportunity so if outcomes are radically unequal, surely that means something needs changing to make opportunities more equal?

Of course it may not always be a precise proxy, but its a lot easier to measure and at least gives a clue that something is up.

do many people still use KDE?

I never really got on with it myself. No distro seems to ship it as their default desktop any more, only as respins. Gnome seems to have pretty much won the desktop environment wars.

Open SCAP has been part of the functionality of Red Hat's Satellite Server for years, in my experience not that many people use it, but enough for it to be well tested. Its been a while since I looked at it but from memeory...

1) SCAP is its own xml based language which includes tests for things like packages installed, sysctl settings, and processes running, but it also has a generic "run this command and check regexp the results" type resource so you can pretty nuch check anything you want with a bit of work. Openscap is an opensource tool for running scap tests.

2) SCAP is a generic standard so it should be applicable to everything, but I've only ever used it on Linux so shrug. I would expect other unix's to be supported.

3) iirc it runs locally, but its pretty trivial to run via puppet (satellite 6 comes with puppet modules) or ansible to run it and pull the reports back to a central server

4) it doesn't run as a daemon, its a binary you run when you want a report. The Satellite puppet modules set up a cron job to run once a week,

Like all these things its only as good as the tests you run and the xml format isn't that easy to write unless you're willing to put in some serious work. There are existing test sets available (again Red Hat supply some) which are a good place to start

Shamelessly stealing links from the discussion on https://lwn.net/Articles/738898/

https://www.avantek.co.uk/arm-server-h270-t70/]

http://www.asacomputers.com/Cavium-ThunderX-ARM.html

https://system76.com/servers/starling

https://www.deltacomputer.com/hochleistungs-rechner/stand...

The Natural History is great, but can be horribly full during school holidays. But if you cant get in just around the corner is the Science Museum which is also excellent.

Especially relevant for this audience is its Information Age gallery which covers "6 networks that changed the world", telegraph, broadcast radio and tv, telephony, satellite (including GPS), the web, and cell phone networks.

Best of all both museums are free to get in (donations welcome).

No that was the treaty that ended the Risc/Cisc wars

>To be frank, I think it's because those who are highly educated often believe they know what's better for a person than the person does; economically & politically speaking.

At a general level is that not the point of education? If people who have studied economics dont understand economics, the benefits and perils of different economic policies and activities, better then those who have never thought about it, then surely there's something seriously wrong?

> In terms of acceptance of minorities, especially (gay, trans or just ethnic) I think that liberal mindset comes from an academic need to include minority opinions into discussion.

This is actually testable, physics, maths and other "hard" sciences gain nothing from including minority opinions (or any opinions) so by your logic science academics should be less liberal then social scientists or liberal arts professors. I doubt that's true though.

I suspect that the better educated a person is the wider their experience or people from other backgrounds and the wider the experience the more the acceptance. But that's just an educated guess ;-)

25k is a decent civil servant salary well above the minimum starting pay. The only "senior civil servants" earning anything like that are the 2 or 3 at the very very top of the civil service on first name terms with the prime minister who have 40 years experience essentially running the country.

If you think a junior developer fresh out of college knowing a bit of javascript is in any way comparable in terms of the value they deliver then you're wrong. Simple as that.