Is every open source app audited? Look at the XZ near disaster. And XZ is pretty critical software. Open source doesn’t mean it’s safe by default, it means that the code can be read.
Norway, Ireland and Spain recognized a Palestinian state on Wednesday in a historic move that drew condemnation from Israel and jubilation from the Palestinians. Israel ordered back its ambassadors from Norway and Ireland....
My first job was in a Big Iron shop in the late 80’s, where I was in charge of backups. We kept Three sets of backups, on two different media, one on hand, one in a different location in the main building, in a water and fireproof safe, and one offsite. We had a major failure one day, and had to do a restore.
Both inhouse copies failed to restore. Thankfully the offsite copy worked. We were in panic. That taught me to keep all my important data on three sets. As the old saying goes: Data loss is not an if question, but a when question. Also, remember that “the cloud” simply means someone else’s remote servers over which you have no control.
These things (and Seagate’s) have the usb interface soldered on, so if the drivd dies, forget about the data, no way to connect to another usb adapter to try to recover. Granted, it’s usually the drive that dies, but in these cases, you have a 100% rate of non recovery . Any other brand’s are standard drives. My favorite are toshiba.
In my experience the drive fails more often than the adapter, but they do fail. Also, there is a good chance to recover data from a failed drive. With a soldered adaptor it’s basically impossible. The worst part is that the externals are often used for backups.
That’s because in the US you could be sent abroad to kill brown people for oil. I was a conscript in my country in the 80’s (Nato). In my country conscripts couldn’t be sent abroad, only professionals. I’d be ok with defending home soil. That doen’t mean that I wanted to do my tour, but I did it. I think I learnt a lot, not least about serving for the common good. Looking back it was good for me. Also, at hat time, after service you’d be in the reserves (simply listed) and the country could raise an army of millions, who’d only need some refresher training in a week, not like the green ass russian conscripts in Ukraine right now.
I’m favor of conscription for limited duration, and no possibility of deployment abroad. Also, women too. That wasn’t a thing then.
Generally you can upgrade RAM of different capacities, but only the amount of RAM that matches the original will run in dual channel. I’ve done it in a couple of machines, and it worked fine. the extra RAM should take a small performance hit, but In my case the tradeoff was worth it. I’ve also upgraded RAM beyond the specified max. Hasn’t always worked.
I’m almost a boomer. I started out in a Big Iron shop that mainly ran Cobol I haven’t touched it in decades, and I was an Admin, so I barely touched the stuff. Now I could read the stuff, but not code a hello world.
A few years back a friend my age, who was a CS major, but had mainly been a mom for 2 decades returned to the job market, thinking that she faced an impossible task, that she had obsoleted herself. She was working within a week, maintaining Cobol at a bank, and making mint.
Banks, Insurance , etc. are ultraconservative as far as tech. They want ultra stable systems. I had an acquaintance that had a business reselling ATMs to banks. Banks had a hard time sourcing EOL ATMs or spares. I remeber a story about some specific 486s CPUs and SIMMs that sold for 1000s, due to not being sourceable new from any supplier, and being needed as replacements for certain ATMs
Banks and insurance companies are also scared shitless of something breaking during upgrades to systems that control billions in funds
Ubuntu has too many problems for me to want to run it. However, it has occurred to me that there aren’t a lot of distros that are like the Ubuntu LTS....
I run Mint Cinnamon. It’s been Rock solid for me. You can modify, add, remove whatever you want. With Flatpacks you are mostly up to date. If you want to install a newer kernel you can, and if you have Timeshift running and something breaks, you just roll back.
I see Mint as an Un-enshittified Ubuntu.
I find cinnamon very frienly and comfortable, which I need in a daily driver. To play I have things like NixOS. I could Arch, but I’m not vegan. :)
That said, I’m giving Fedora Kinoite (Atomic) a try in a VM
I’m having the hardest tine setting up a shared folder between a Linux host and Win11guest. I want to get rid of dual boot, but there are a few programs that I use which are Win only. I have set up a VB VM, but I want a fine tuned KVM VM. On VB sharing is trivial, but I can’t get it to work in KVM. I have the host sharing...
Is Stremio a honeypot?
Does anybody have the impression that Stremio may be a honeypot of some sort?...
Norway, Ireland and Spain recognize a Palestinian state in a historic move (apnews.com)
Norway, Ireland and Spain recognized a Palestinian state on Wednesday in a historic move that drew condemnation from Israel and jubilation from the Palestinians. Israel ordered back its ambassadors from Norway and Ireland....
“Unprecedented” Google Cloud event wipes out customer account and its backups (arstechnica.com)
Google Cloud accidentally deleted UniSuper’s account and backups, causing a major data loss and downtime for the company....
Not Dead Yet: WD Releases New 6TB 2.5-Inch External Hard Drives - First Upgrade in Seven Years (www.extremetech.com)
Orcas Just Sank Another Yacht (www.scientificamerican.com)
Germany may introduce conscription for all 18-year-olds (www.telegraph.co.uk)
Barcelona is parched — and angry at quenched tourists (www.politico.eu)
The yawning gap between locals’ and visitors’ consumption is stoking long-standing resentments ahead of an election....
iFixit hails replaceable LPCAMM2 laptop memory as a 'big deal' (www.theregister.com)
Is Boeing in big trouble? World's largest aerospace firm faces 10 more whistleblowers after sudden death of two (www.hindustantimes.com)
Still... (gnucobol.sourceforge.io)
COBOL is not obsolete?
So now what distro are we running for LTS desktops?
Ubuntu has too many problems for me to want to run it. However, it has occurred to me that there aren’t a lot of distros that are like the Ubuntu LTS....
What is the most popular Linux distribution on PC?
Fedora Linux 40 Officially Released with Kernel 6.8, Gnome 46 & KDE 6 (9to5linux.com)
Sadly, DNF5 and the new Anaconda installer didn’t make it to the party, in case you were wondering.
Why is Windows 11 so annoying? (www.theverge.com)
Why is folder sharing between host and guest in KVM so hard?
I’m having the hardest tine setting up a shared folder between a Linux host and Win11guest. I want to get rid of dual boot, but there are a few programs that I use which are Win only. I have set up a VB VM, but I want a fine tuned KVM VM. On VB sharing is trivial, but I can’t get it to work in KVM. I have the host sharing...