In other news today...
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@boomzilla he’s been agitating for that for a while when he saw the cloud bill.
He does even concede that cloud can be the correct approach if your load is super lumpy and unpredictable but if your traffic is predictable and reasonably stable, having your own gear can be vastly cheaper because you’re not paying for scale on demand.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
The cloud is so much better
Speaking of that:
My personal favourite is working corporate and noone is able to navigate the byzantine procurement process so you’re 14 months into developing a newletter.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla he’s been agitating for that for a while when he saw the cloud bill.
He does even concede that cloud can be the correct approach if your load is super lumpy and unpredictable but if your traffic is predictable and reasonably stable, having your own gear can be vastly cheaper because you’re not paying for scale on demand.
I hope at some point the grownups at the company I work for that have a massive cloud obsession realise that and get over it.
We own our data centres. Not just the servers but the entire buildings they're in.
Everytime I hear someone mention the amount their team is paying GCP or whatever for something they could have on premise for a fraction of the cost (and effectively a one-off cost, as the infrastructure team pick up the long term running costs) it makes me wince.
New cloudy stuff also costs the wrong sort of money too as it can't be capitalised.
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
New cloudy stuff also costs the wrong sort of money too as it can't be capitalised.
I mean, maybe life is different in your neck of the woods, but over here OpEx is 100% tax deductible in the same year it's incurred, while CapEx is drawn out over 5+ years, depending on the type of capital purchased, the size of your company, and whether the gubmint is busy playing games with "bonus depreciation" rules to try to stave off yet another recession caused by... [error, tangent detected]
The business world always oscillates back and forth between whether OpEx or CapEx is preferred, so I'm sure we'll see the pendulum swing back at some point.
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New cloudy stuff also costs the wrong sort of money too as it can't be capitalised.
I ran into that recently. I stopped paying attention when I realise I couldn't expense it. Apparently you can write off some on-prem costs but cloudy stuff goes into another bucket that you can’t write off.
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@izzion said in In other news today...:
I mean, maybe life is different in your neck of the woods
I don't care enough to get into the details beyond "OpEx bad, CapEx good", but I think at least some of the things around it are our own internal accounting policies set by our own finance department.
@izzion said in In other news today...:
The business world always oscillates back and forth between whether OpEx or CapEx is preferred, so I'm sure we'll see the pendulum swing back at some point.
CapEx has always been preferred at this company for reasons I wasn't interested in enough to remember.
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This explains why corporate got their knickers in a knot over this recently. Most of the vms were stripped of jdks one night a few weeks back.
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@DogsB we've been on OpenJDK for a while now.
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@izzion said in In other news today...:
It looks like someone redacted the documents with a black Sharpie
No it doesn't
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@Carnage said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Carnage hasn’t it been “open source base, but you can do almost nothing without the closed source google services” for years?
Well, there has been plenty you needed to provide yourself, and what you need to provide yourself keeps increasing.
As long as you still can, that should be fine. In fact it may even be better to have a Google-free phone dialer app
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
I hope at some point the grownups at the company I work for that have a massive cloud obsession realise that and get over it.
QFT. I don't hold out that much hope on the end over here, though.
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla he’s been agitating for that for a while when he saw the cloud bill.
He does even concede that cloud can be the correct approach if your load is super lumpy and unpredictable but if your traffic is predictable and reasonably stable, having your own gear can be vastly cheaper because you’re not paying for scale on demand.
I hope at some point the grownups at the company I work for that have a massive cloud obsession realise that and get over it.
We own our data centres. Not just the servers but the entire buildings they're in.
Everytime I hear someone mention the amount their team is paying GCP or whatever for something they could have on premise for a fraction of the cost (and effectively a one-off cost, as the infrastructure team pick up the long term running costs) it makes me wince.
New cloudy stuff also costs the wrong sort of money too as it can't be capitalised.How did everyone miss the buzzword of "private cloud"?
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@Kamil-Podlesak How is that related to edge computing?
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@cvi It is not. Private cloud is the infrastructure maintained by your own IT department. I.e. the thing we've always done and didn't call it cloud. While ‘edge computing’ is the devices installed closer to customers than the datacentre (either a detached datacentre with proxies, i.e. CDN, or on customer premises, i.e. Io
TS).
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Private cloud is the
hosted infrastructuremaintained by your own IT department. I.e. the thing we've always done and didn't call it cloud.We're offering a Cloud based mainframe!
Yes it's the same mainframe application we have been selling from before the company existed. But Cloud! Ok, we'll put a nicer website frontend in there for you, we'll host that from servers sitting besides the mainframe. But Cloud! Oh, we're going to move the website onto a dedicated Azure machine but don't worry, nothing is actually changing because you where already in the Cloud!. Since you where already in the Cloud we actually made the front-end in the Cloud and maybe in 10 years we will also be able to shut down that mainframe.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
This explains why corporate got their knickers in a knot over this recently. Most of the vms were stripped of jdks one night a few weeks back.
Oracle has the reputation of having Byzantine pricing, and this seems to go along with that spirit.
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@jinpa said in In other news today...:
Byzantine pricing
I'd say more "Asmodean", aka "diabolical" aka "trying to ensure you pay the maximum for the minimum benefit".
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It must be that time of year for whichever sailing competition Larry is entering this year. Those yachts don’t pay for themselves.
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@Bulb I have this business idea. Let's call it the "private edge". In essence, you get to buy and maintain your own infrastructure with your own IT department, but you pay ${new company} for the privilege.
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The key thing about “private cloud” is that the corp in question already has the resources on hand for building things out but it just isn’t provisioned - and you provision them typically self-serve like you do on the public clouds. It’s not quite like the “you have an IT team on hand to do shit”
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@Luhmann said in In other news today...:
you where already in the Cloud!
Where in the cloud? I hope your EGPWS is working, because some clouds have rocks in them.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Luhmann said in In other news today...:
you where already in the Cloud!
Where in the cloud? I hope your EGPWS is working, because some clouds have rocks in them.
Ah yes, the Granite Velocity Control Sysem for your Concrete Cloud!
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@Bulb I have this business idea. Let's call it the "private edge". In essence, you get to buy and maintain your own infrastructure with your own IT department, but you pay ${new company} for the privilege.
?
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Weather forecast is bright sunshine. For Artificial Intelligence:
Artificial intelligence forecasts the weather in a flash
A model using artificial intelligence (AI) forecasts global weather as accurately, and more than 10,000 times faster, than the best system in use, researchers report this week in Nature. The conventional tool, run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, is computationally intensive, requiring hours of supercomputer calculations to produce a 10-day forecast. The new AI-based model—named Pangu-Weather and developed by Huawei, the Chinese tech giant—improves on previous AI-powered models by simulating weather at different altitudes and forecasting tropical cyclones, with results reliable out to 10 days, researchers say. The research team trained the model on 39 years of historical weather data; the system is untested yet using real-time observational data. Another AI-based weather model, GraphCast, described by Google DeepMind in a December 2022 preprint, also outperformed the European system.
(from Science - New at a glance)
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@Mason_Wheeler You'd be dangerous too, if people were singing about tying you down.
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@jinpa It's not the wallaby he says to tie down.
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@Mason_Wheeler So he has a wallaby and a kangaroo? Do Aussies studiously keep the terms separate?
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@jinpa Apparently so.
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@Mason_Wheeler Meh. There's a difference between scooters and motorcycles, but bikers will sometimes call their motorcycles scooters.
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@jinpa said in In other news today...:
@Mason_Wheeler Meh. There's a difference between scooters and motorcycles, but bikers will sometimes call their motorcycles scooters.
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@jinpa said in In other news today...:
@Mason_Wheeler So he has a wallaby and a kangaroo? Do Aussies studiously keep the terms separate?
I just play it safe and say ‘macropod,’ even if I’m 99% sure it’s an Eastern Grey.
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@kazitor Do Australians even use the word "marsupial", given that in their part of the world it's virtually a synonym for "mammal"?
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@da-Doctah said in In other news today...:
Do Australians even use the word "marsupial"
The word what?
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@DogsB So the same thing I've been doing with my Samsung device for six years already? I suppose Apple will "invent" it in 2025 now.
Yes, the original version "required" the DeX dock, but it was swiftly followed by third-party devices that supported DeX mode just as well. Now of course you just need a usb-hdmi adapter or wireless display for the phones, and the higher-end tablets don't even require an external display.
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You think you could deter birds with anti-bird spikes? Ha! They'll just show you and take the spikes as building material for their nests.
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@BernieTheBernie They go even further. They reuse them as anti-bird spikes against other birds—the article (I read it; ) mentions magpie nests with the spikes above them pointing out to keep predators away (they would normally build such defences from thorny branches, and these strips are more thorny than any bush).
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@DogsB this is certainly ironic coming from Oracle, as their main product are lawyers apparently. But the blog post is definitely right on this issue.
I’m sure IBM has lawyers that will … make it legal … but this is quite clearly breaking the spirit of the GPL, which grants you rights to distribute the source. IBM appears to be saying “oh sure, you have those rights, we just punish you for exercising them”. That’s not how that works for anything else.
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@topspin GPL grants anybody who has the RHEL binaries to get, and distribute, the sources. So now someone who uses RHEL, under the license, would have to be so kind and push the sources somewhere public.
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@Bulb they can, but only once. Then Red Hat just cancels their subscription.
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@topspin That's the point where good lawyers will be needed, because that does violate the letter of GPL. And because the license does not specify how it is restored after violation is fixed, the court will get to choose.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@topspin That's the point where good lawyers will be needed, because that does violate the letter of GPL. And because the license does not specify how it is restored after violation is fixed, the court will get to choose.
Probably. Just needs someone willing to pay the lawyers to fight them.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@topspin That's the point where good lawyers will be needed, because that does violate the letter of GPL. And because the license does not specify how it is restored after violation is fixed, the court will get to choose.
IANAL, but that doesn't seem to violate the letter of it, I'm curious to see what the lawyers / judges would say
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@sockpuppet7 The paragraph 6 includes
You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
Therefore, IBM RedHat may not tell their customers not to redistribute either the binaries nor the sources any further.
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@Bulb the opening of para 6 is even more relevant.
Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions.
And from the GPL FAQs:
If I distribute GPL'd software for a fee, am I required to also make it available to the public without a charge?
No. However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.
That said, the GPL has always been kind of woolly on the notion of paid-for anything still somehow being viable while being GPL - yes you can charge for something but by definition anyone who pays must be able to share. So you have to look at how to monetise something not the software, such as support contracts.
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@Arantor My impression was always that charging a fee for GPL software was only allowed so you can cover distribution costs.
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@PleegWat from the GPL FAQ:
Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)
Does the GPL allow me to charge a fee for downloading the program from my distribution site?
Yes. You can charge any fee you wish for distributing a copy of the program. If you distribute binaries by download, you must provide “equivalent access” to download the source—therefore, the fee to download source may not be greater than the fee to download the binary.
There is nothing wrong with RHEL being sold, for money and including the source in that.
The sticking point is onwards, and covered also in the FAQ:
If I distribute GPL'd software for a fee, am I required to also make it available to the public without a charge?
No. However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.
So if CentOS were to buy an RHEL, they’d be permitted to remix and redistribute it as they’d see fit, and this is the issue that IBM’s lawyers apparently have decided to ignore.