grumpy-cowboy

HDD (Hype Driven Development). Like projects using Microservices, Serverless, NoSQL, CQRS, Hadoop, [add your preferred hype here]... technologies for no good reason.

You _rent_ cable service. He _bought_ a book. Not the same thing.

There is a lot of "fake" workstations: everything is so clean! No Fritos bag, no Coke bottles, no paper, no trash, ... just clean desks! Fake! lol :D

Electron apps on my Librem 5?? Filling up RAM and draining the battery at the speed of light? No thanks.

They will not be able to force their crap in my future Librem 5 phone.

You can fix security bugs without forcing your users to upgrade entire OS.

If a company X doesn't want to support something, then they should open it (source code, hardware specs, ...) so someone else can continue to support it. Always having to trash something that is working fine is stupid.

For example, I have an old iPad2 (last Apple device I bought) that is working perfectly (the hardware). But I'm not able to install anything "new" on it because iOS 9 is no more supported by applications. Why Apple doesn't open specifications so i can install Linux on it to extends its life for many years to come?

I take an example from Apple but it's applicable to ANY companies.

Mosaic -> Netscape -> Firefox -> Chrome -> Firefox

IE only if it's REALLY required by badly designed products/sites.

Microsoft turned down facial-recognition sales on PR concerns.

I have a Dell Precision M4800 laptop (32GM RAM, I7, SSD, ...) I bought in october 2014. It's a beast! I run Linux (Mint) on it and it's really fast even if we are 5 years later. I'm a software engineer. I run many VMs, Docker, ... Compiling code (C, Java, ...). Processing big files. It's fast. No problem.

IMHO, Dell XPS laptop looking more cheap. Not really for "professionals".

I have no reason to change it right now but my next laptop will probably be a ThinkPad. Why? Honestly I don't know but in every place I go (I'm a freelancer), I see ThinkPads everywhere.

100% decentralization is an utopia. But with the Fediverse, we have the best of the both worlds: most people will register to a "centralized" instance like mastodon.social and people who want will be able to run their own instances/nodes with their rules, their policies, ... and federate it. Pretty much like any email server.

I'm in the process to move out mass-surveillance social sites like FB, Twitter, Google, ... I'm about to install my own Matrix and ActivityPub nodes (Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, ...) on a cheap VPS.

I also have my own email domain hosted at Fastmail.com (I don't want to manage an email server).

This way I'll manage MY own data. I'll share it with who I want. And it's a fun project. :)

Fax machine -> fax machine : secure

And fax machines are easy to use.

Securing document exchange by email is a PITA for 99.9% users. Explain to your mother how to use PGP/GPG to encrypt the email she have to send to financial institutions, government, ... And imagine the government employee receiving the encrypted email. He will probably just delete it. :)

Add a RSS feed please ;)

Start your own freelancer/consultant business. Businesses will pay you a lot of money for your knowledge and wisdom. This is what I did 9 years ago (I'm 43 now) and I never looked back.

My ex-employer said that if I want to have a better pay, I'll had to have a management job. I'm not interested AT ALL about having a management job. I LOVE programming, system engineering, ...

This is why I started my own "one-man" freelancer business : I do what I want (and not what my boss want), when I want, ...

Now, I work for MY dreams and not the dreams of another person ;)

Yes. Endless story. What I see in many of my clients projects (I'm a freelancer, 23+ years in IT) is a return to some kind of "monolith" applications.

They surfed on the "everything must be Google-scalable..." trends. They built hundreds of interconnected micro/nano-services, upgraded networking infrastructure ($$), OAuth federation, ...

What they've got? Network latency/congestion/..., security and API versionning management nightmare, unresponsive applications (tooooo manyyyy APIs calls), performance issues, circuit-breaker, caching, ... Ok you see the big picture.

Now, the returned back to a more "monolith" design. They merged many services together in one application (services that wasn't called by anything else). Everything doesn't need to be exposed as a service. This simplified security management, reduce a lot the network usage and simplified bugs investigation/fix.

The difference is that now, their new monolith designs are more modularized than before. Everything is now in a clear module (call it jar file, lib, package, ...) with a clear contract/interface. This is what I like to call "intra-services" : clear services/features separation minus the networking/security moving parts (and all band-aid solutions to support it like circuit-breakers, distributed caches, ...).

If one day you are the size of Google, Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, ... you will probably have the money/manpower to implement it the "Google way". Until then, KISS!

Note: English is not my first language.

I'm in the process to move Google and Facebook out of my life (to many privacy abuses). I now have my own email/domain (paid Fastmail account). This is a long process because I have my GMail email since the beginning of Gmail service.

On the phone side, I'm waiting for my pre-ordered "Librem 5" phone to replace my Google Pixel.

Lets ban Bell Canada. Here the list of Bell's subsidiaries to ban :

  - Bell Canada
  - Bell Media
  - Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (37.5%)
  - Bell Mobility
  - Bell Aliant
  - Virgin Mobile Canada
  - Bell Internet
  - Bell TV
  - Bell Fibe TV
  - Fibe
  - Bell MTS
  - Lucky Mobile
  - The Source (retailer)
  - CraveTV

If security fixes can take months, then it's not suitable for any use (especially on servers).