its more likely than you think

The early twenties intermediate dev on my team was explaining the other week that if you remember a time before smartphones and broadband, you are old

I personally am familiar with 2 organisations with millions of dollars in annual revenue that deploy critical line of business applications like this in 2024

Fun fact, a significant proportion of the people doing these scams are victims of human trafficking who are being forced into it with threats of violence

git-annex maybe?

Dealing with this at the moment - in an org that’s been pretty lax at writing anything down about what and why as far as internal software goes, trying (with support from C-suite) to get people to actually write up any amount of detail in their requests is like pulling teeth.

I tend to take that position as well; if it’s not defined, I get to define it. If I ask for feedback or review and get silence, that means you approve.

Because accountants mostly.

For large businesses, you essentially have two ways to spend money:

• OPEX: “operational expenditure” - this is money that you send on an ongoing basis, things like rent, wages, the 3rd party cleaning company, cloud services etc. The expectation is that when you use OPEX, the money disappears off the books and you don’t get a tangible thing back in return. Most departments will have an OPEX budget to spend for the year.
• CAPEX: “capital expenditure” - buying physical stuff, things like buildings, stock, machinery and servers. When you buy a physical thing, it gets listed as an asset on the company accounts, usually being “worth” whatever you paid for it. The problem is that things tend to lose value over time (with the exception of property), so when you buy a thing the accountants will want to know a depreciation rate - how much value it will lose per year. For computer equipment, this is typically ~20%, being “worthless” in 5 years. Departments typically don’t have a big CAPEX budget, and big purchases typically need to be approved by the company board.

This leaves companies in a slightly odd spot where from an accounting standpoint, it might look better on the books to spend $3 million/year on cloud stuff than $10 million every 5 years on servers

The APs reporting seems to indicate “probably not” - both Israel and Iran are refusing to comment or acknowledge the strike, which gives both sides a way to step back without having to lose face. If Iran or Israel were intending to escalate, they’d be shouting from the rooftops about “see! Look what happened!”.

Still pretty scary though, wouldn’t take much for a miscommunication or misunderstanding for this to rapidly escalate even if no one wants it to.

Removed by mod

Definitely interested - is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?

I’ve been bitten before with a device that “supports” a major distribution, but only if you install our custom pre-built image (good luck auditing what we’ve tweaked) and only with our special pre-built kernel that isn’t even an LTS version, and has a bunch of patches applied to support whatever weird peripherals we decided to throw on the board, and will get exactly 0 updates after the initial release.

Raspberry Pi gets around this by being big enough to get buy in from vendors (Ubuntu distributes a special kernel + firmware bundle), but support for all the other smaller knock offs seem shaky at best

I’d be super surprised if this was western intelligence. Stuxnet escaping Natanz was an accident, and there is no way that an operation like this would get approved by the NSAs Vulnerabilities Equities Process.

My money would be MSS or GRU. Outside chance this is North Korean, but doesn’t really feel like their MO

I think the conclusion is that as a population of people grows the average behaviour stays pretty much fine, but the extremes of the bell curve become more apparent

Yeah, not even slightly true. Know a few people who work support for a major piece of financials software. Company has a written procedure for dealing with death threats that gets exercised multiple times per year

A quick guide to explain what is going on here, and what the numbers mean: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DaMLUoGXUAI21V6.jpg:large

Do this specifically so a judge has to rule if someone is being a dick or not. File amicus briefs on the definition of being a dick. Assemble a jury of peers to decide if the defendants are being a dick. Appeal to the supreme court to rule if the court erred in their judgement of the dickishness at question in this matter.

Debian makes more sense to me because I’ve been using Debian and Ubuntu since people were getting excited about Debian Wheezy coming out soon.

What little I have used of RHEL and CentOS they seem to be pretty logically designed, just different. I hadn’t come across any real WTFs trying to use them. RHEL makes Debian look bleeding edge and reckless with their updates by comparison

This is neat. I’ve played about with the idea of doing something similar, but embedding the result in a minimal Linux image built for some esoteric CPU and emulating it in the browser using something like JSLinux

I don’t really care if I’m running a kernel from 5 years ago as long as I’m still getting timely security updates. What I care about is having up to date versions of the apps I actually use day-to-day - through Flatpack, Docker or whatever, and I prefer to have an up to date WM cos it’s something I interact with a lot.

What is it about Ubuntu LTS that makes it a hard pass?

Neon works great for me.

• I prefer Debian derived distros (RH derivatives are fine as a technology, but I’ve been using Debian derivatives for so long that RedHat feels like coming home and finding someone has rearranged your cutlery drawer and all your plates - I don’t care if your system makes more sense, in sure I’d get used to it but right now I can’t find anything!)
• I do most of my work in Docker or using tools I install from upstream
• I don’t really play games so don’t care about marginal performance gains from newer drivers

Pretty much I just want a laptop that just works when I need it to, while still having a nice, friendly, modern interface and Neon does that.