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This week on the show, you're not too late to develop the future, netmap on czgbe, OpenZFS 2.2.3, SSH Brute Forcing, some unknown OpenBSD Features, Release notes for the latest Omni OS, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines When the Power Macintosh ran NetWare (featuring Wormhole and Cyberpunk) (https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/12/when-power-macintosh-ran-netware.html) You are not too late (https://kk.org/thetechnium/you-are-not-late/) News Roundup netmap on cxgbe interfaces (https://adventurist.me/posts/00318) OpenZFS 2.2.3 (https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-2.2.3) A recent abrupt change in Internet SSH brute force attacks against us (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/SSHBruteForceAttacksAbruptlyDown) Some OpenBSD features that aren't widely known (https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-02-20-rarely-known-openbsd-features.html) Release Notes for OmniOS v11 r151048 (https://github.com/omniosorg/omnios-build/blob/44731424e67c8aaafe5c4e500fe7c4544a22f0f6/doc/ReleaseNotes.md#r151048o-2024-02-15) The Making of RP2040 Doom (https://kilograham.github.io/rp2040-doom/) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Brendan - Log Files (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/550/feedback/Brendan%20-%20Log%20Files.md) Mischa - EuroBSDcon (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/550/feedback/Mischa%20-%20EuroBSDcon.md) Sebastiano - Sed (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/550/feedback/Sebastiano%20-%20Sed.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)
Hacker History sits down with Robert Reif or winxp5421 to hear his story. Robert got a start on some old gear, left tech for a while, and now runs password cracking villages and participates in password cracking contests. The conversation is a fascinating view into the world of competitive password cracking with some advice and […]
One of my first jobs out of college was ripping Banyan VINES out of a company and replacing it with LAN Manager. Banyan VINES was a network operating system for Unix systems. It came along in 1984. This was a time when minicomputers running Unix were running at most every University and when Unix offered far more features that the alternatives. Sharing files was as old as the Internet. Telnet was created in 1969. FTP came along in 1971. SMB in 1983. Networking computers together had evolved from just the ARPANET to local protocols like ALOHAnet, which inspired Bob Metcalfe to start work on the PARC Universal Packet protocol with David Boggs, which evolved into the Xerox Network Systems, or XNS, suite of networking protocols that were developed to network the Xerox Alto. Along the way the two of them co-invented Ethernet. But there were developments happening in various locations in silos. For example, TCP was more of an ARPANET then NSFNET project so wasn't used for computers on their own networks to communicate yet. Data General was founded in 1968 when Edson de Castro, the project manager for the PDP-8 at Digital Equipment Corporation, grew frustrated that the PDP wasn't evolving fast enough. He, Henry Burkhardt, and Richard Sogge of Digital would be joined by Herbert Richman, who did sales for Fairchild Semiconductor. They were proud of the PDP-8. It was a beautiful machine. But they wanted to go even further. And they didn't feel like they could do so at Digital. A few computers later, Within a year, they shipped the next generation machine, which they called the Nova. They released more computers but then came the explosion of computers that was the personal computing market. Microcomputers showed up in offices around the world and on multiple desks. And it didn't take long before people started wondering if it wouldn't be faster to run a cable between computers than it was to save a file to a floppy and get on an elevator. By the 1970s, Data General had been writing software for customers, mostly for the rising tide of UNIX System V implementations. But just giving customers a TCP/IP stack or an application that could open a socket over an X.25 network, which was later replaced with Frame Relay networks run by phone systems and for legacy support on those X.25 was streamed over TCP/IP. Some of the people from those projects at Data General saw an opportunity to build a company that focused on a common need, moving files back and forth between the microcomputers that were also being connected to these networks. David Mahoney was a manager at Data General who saw what customers were asking for. And he saw an increasing under of those microcomputers needed a few common services to connect to. So he left to form Banyan Systems in 1983, bringing Anand Jagannathan and Larry Floryan with him. They built Banyan VINES (Virtual Integrated NEtwork Service) in 1984, releasing version 1. Their client software could run on DOS and connect to X.25, Token Ring (which IBM introduced in 1984), or the Ethernet networks Bob Metcalfe from Xerox and then 3Com was a proponent of. After all, much of their work resembled the Xerox Network Systems protocols, which Metcalfe had helped develop. They used a 32-bit address. They developed an Address Resolution Protocol (or ARP) and Routing Table Protocol (RTP) that used tables on a server. And they created a file services application, print services application, and directory service they called StreetTalk. To help, they brought in Jim Allchin, who eventually did much of the heavy lifting. It was similar enough to TCP/IP, but different. Yet as TCP/IP became the standard, they added that at a cost. The whole thing came in at $17,000 and ran on less bandwidth than other services, and so they won a few contracts with the US State Deparment, US Marine Corps, and other government agencies. Many embassies used 300 baud phone lines with older modems and the new VINES service allowed them to do file sharing, print sharing, and even instant messaging throughout the late 80s and early 90s. The Marine Corp used it during the Gulf War and in an early form of a buying tornado, they went public in 1992, raising $28 million through NASDAQ. They grew to 410 employees and peaked at around $75 million in sales, spread across 7000 customers. They'd grown through word of mouth and other companies with strong marketing and sales arms were waiting in the wings. Novel was founded in 1983 in Utah and they developed the IPX network protocol. Netware would eventually become one of the most dominant network operating systems for Windows 3 and then Windows 95 computers. Yet, with incumbents like Banyan VINES and Novel Netware, this is another one of those times when Microsoft saw an opening for something better and just willed it into existence. And the story is similar to that of dozens of other companies including Novell, Lotus, VisiCalc, Netscape, Digital Research, and the list goes on and on and on. This kept happening because of a number of reasons. The field of computing had been comprised of former academics, many of whom weren't aggressive in business. Microsoft ended up owning the operating system and so had selling power when it came to cornering adjacent markets because they could provide the cleanest possible user experience. People seemed to underestimate Microsoft until it was too late. Inertia. Oh, and Microsoft could outspend on top talent and offer them the biggest impact for their work. Whatever the motivators, Microsoft won in nearly every nook and cranny in the IT field that they pursued for decades. The damaging part for Banyan was when they teamed up with IBM to ship LAN Manager, which ultimately shipped under the name of each company. Microsoft ended up recruiting Jim Allchin away and with network interface cards falling below $1,000 it became clear that the local area network was really just in its infancy. He inherited LAN Manager and then NT from Dave Cutler and the next thing we knew, Windows NT Server was born, complete with file services, print services, and a domain, which wasn't a fully qualified domain name until the release of Active Directory. Microsoft added Windsock in 1993 and released their own protocols. They supported protocols like IPX/SPX and DECnet but slowly moved customers to their own protocols. Banyan released the last version of Banyan VINES, 7.0, in 1997. StreetTalk eventually became an NT to LDAP bridge before being cancelled in the end. The dot com bubble was firmly here, though, so all was not lost. They changed their name in 1999 to ePresence, shifting their focus to identity management and security, officially pulling out of the VINES market. But the dot com bubble burst, so they were acquired in 2003 by Unisys. There were other companies in different networking niches along the way. Phil Karn wrote KA9Q NOS to connect CP/M and then DOS to TCP/IP in 1985. He wrote it on a Xerox 820, but by then Xerox was putting Zilog chips in computers and running CP/M, seemingly with little of the flair the Alto could have had. But with KA9Q NOS any of the personal computers on the market could get on the Internet and that software helped host many a commercial dialup connection and would go on to be used for years in small embedded devices that needed IP connectivity. Those turned out to be markets overtaken by Banyan who was overtaken by Novel, who was overtaken by Microsoft when they added WinSock. There are a few things to take away from this journey. The first is that when IBM and Microsoft team up to develop a competing product, it's time to pivot when there's plenty of money left in the bank. The second is that there was an era of closed systems that was short lived when vendors wanted to increasingly embrace open standards. Open standards like TCP/IP. We also want to keep our most talented team in place. Jim Allchin was responsible for those initial Windows Server implementations. Then SQL Server. He was the kind of person who's a game changer on a team. We also don't want to pivot to the new hotness because it's the new hotness. Customers pay vendors to solve problems. Putting an e in front of the name of a company seemed really cool in 1998. But surveying customers and thinking more deeply about problems they face - that's where magic can happen. Provided we have the right talent to make it happen.
About ABAB Periasamy is the co-founder and CEO of MinIO, an open source provider of high performance, object storage software. In addition to this role, AB is an active investor and advisor to a wide range of technology companies, from H2O.ai and Manetu where he serves on the board to advisor or investor roles with Humio, Isovalent, Starburst, Yugabyte, Tetrate, Postman, Storj, Procurify, and Helpshift. Successful exits include Gitter.im (Gitlab), Treasure Data (ARM) and Fastor (SMART).AB co-founded Gluster in 2005 to commoditize scalable storage systems. As CTO, he was the primary architect and strategist for the development of the Gluster file system, a pioneer in software defined storage. After the company was acquired by Red Hat in 2011, AB joined Red Hat's Office of the CTO. Prior to Gluster, AB was CTO of California Digital Corporation, where his work led to scaling of the commodity cluster computing to supercomputing class performance. His work there resulted in the development of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's “Thunder” code, which, at the time was the second fastest in the world. AB holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India.AB is one of the leading proponents and thinkers on the subject of open source software - articulating the difference between the philosophy and business model. An active contributor to a number of open source projects, he is a board member of India's Free Software Foundation.Links: MinIO: https://min.io/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/abperiasamy MinIO Slack channel: https://minio.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-11qsphhj7-HpmNOaIh14LHGrmndrhocA LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abperiasamy/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They've also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is, in AWS, with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem, and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai, and Stax have seen significant results by using them, and it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.in a siloCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by someone who's doing something a bit off the beaten path when we talk about cloud. I've often said that S3 is sort of a modern wonder of the world. It was the first AWS service brought into general availability. Today's promoted guest is the co-founder and CEO of MinIO, Anand Babu Periasamy, or AB as he often goes, depending upon who's talking to him. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.AB: It's wonderful to be here, Corey. Thank you for having me.Corey: So, I want to start with the obvious thing, where you take a look at what is the cloud and you can talk about AWS's ridiculous high-level managed services, like Amazon Chime. Great, we all see how that plays out. And those are the higher-level offerings, ideally aimed at problems customers have, but then they also have the baseline building blocks services, and it's hard to think of a more baseline building block than an object store. That's something every cloud provider has, regardless of how many scare quotes there are around the word cloud; everyone offers the object store. And your solution is to look at this and say, “Ah, that's a market ripe for disruption. We're going to build through an open-source community software that emulates an object store.” I would be sitting here, more or less poking fun at the idea except for the fact that you're a billion-dollar company now.AB: Yeah.Corey: How did you get here?AB: So, when we started, right, we did not actually think about cloud that way, right? “Cloud, it's a hot trend, and let's go disrupt is like that. It will lead to a lot of opportunity.” Certainly, it's true, it lead to the M&S, right, but that's not how we looked at it, right? It's a bad idea to build startups for M&A.When we looked at the problem, when we got back into this—my previous background, some may not know that it's actually a distributed file system background in the open-source space.Corey: Yeah, you were one of the co-founders of Gluster—AB: Yeah.Corey: —which I have only begrudgingly forgiven you. But please continue.AB: [laugh]. And back then we got the idea right, but the timing was wrong. And I had—while the data was beginning to grow at a crazy rate, end of the day, GlusterFS has to still look like an FS, it has to look like a file system like NetApp or EMC, and it was hugely limiting what we can do with it. The biggest problem for me was legacy systems. I have to build a modern system that is compatible with a legacy architecture, you cannot innovate.And that is where when Amazon introduced S3, back then, like, when S3 came, cloud was not big at all, right? When I look at it, the most important message of the cloud was Amazon basically threw everything that is legacy. It's not [iSCSI 00:03:21] as a Service; it's not even FTP as a Service, right? They came up with a simple, RESTful API to store your blobs, whether it's JavaScript, Android, iOS, or [AAML 00:03:30] application, or even Snowflake-type application.Corey: Oh, we spent ten years rewriting our apps to speak object store, and then they released EFS, which is NFS in the cloud. It's—AB: Yeah.Corey: —I didn't realize I could have just been stubborn and waited, and the whole problem would solve itself. But here we are. You're quite right.AB: Yeah. And even EFS and EBS are more for legacy stock can come in, buy some time, but that's not how you should stay on AWS, right? When Amazon did that, for me, that was the opportunity. I saw that… while world is going to continue to produce lots and lots of data, if I built a brand around that, I'm not going to go wrong.The problem is data at scale. And what do I do there? The opportunity I saw was, Amazon solved one of the largest problems for a long time. All the legacy systems, legacy protocols, they convinced the industry, throw them away and then start all over from scratch with the new API. While it's not compatible, it's not standard, it is ridiculously simple compared to anything else.No fstabs, no [unintelligible 00:04:27], no [root 00:04:28], nothing, right? From any application anywhere you can access was a big deal. When I saw that, I was like, “Thank you Amazon.” And I also knew Amazon would convince the industry that rewriting their application is going to be better and faster and cheaper than retrofitting legacy applications.Corey: I wonder how much that's retconned because talking to some of the people involved in the early days, they were not at all convinced they [laugh] would be able to convince the industry to do this.AB: Actually, if you talk to the analyst reporters, the IDC's, Gartner's of the world to the enterprise IT, the VMware community, they would say, “Hell no.” But if you talk to the actual application developers, data infrastructure, data architects, the actual consumers of data, for them, it was so obvious. They actually did not know how to write an fstab. The iSCSI and NFS, you can't even access across the internet, and the modern applications, they ran across the globe, in JavaScript, and all kinds of apps on the device. From [Snap 00:05:21] to Snowflake, today is built on object store. It was more natural for the applications team, but not from the infrastructure team. So, who you asked that mattered.But nevertheless, Amazon convinced the rest of the world, and our bet was that if this is going to be the future, then this is also our opportunity. S3 is going to be limited because it only runs inside AWS. Bulk of the world's data is produced everywhere and only a tiny fraction will go to AWS. And where will the rest of the data go? Not SAN, NAS, HDFS, or other blob store, Azure Blob, or GCS; it's not going to be fragmented. And if we built a better object store, lightweight, faster, simpler, but fully compatible with S3 API, we can sweep and consolidate the market. And that's what happened.Corey: And there is a lot of validity to that. We take a look across the industry, when we look at various standards—I mean, one of the big problems with multi-cloud in many respects is the APIs are not quite similar enough. And worse, the failure patterns are very different, of I don't just need to know how the load balancer works, I need to know how it breaks so I can detect and plan for that. And then you've got the whole identity problem as well, where you're trying to manage across different frames of reference as you go between providers, and leads to a bit of a mess. What is it that makes MinIO something that has been not just something that has endured since it was created, but clearly been thriving?AB: The real reason, actually is not the multi-cloud compatibility, all that, right? Like, while today, it is a big deal for the users because the deployments have grown into 10-plus petabytes, and now the infrastructure team is taking it over and consolidating across the enterprise, so now they are talking about which key management server for storing the encrypted keys, which key management server should I talk to? Look at AWS, Google, or Azure, everyone has their own proprietary API. Outside they, have [YAML2 00:07:18], HashiCorp Vault, and, like, there is no standard here. It is supposed to be a [KMIP 00:07:23] standard, but in reality, it is not. Even different versions of Vault, there are incompatibilities for us.That is where—like from Key Management Server, Identity Management Server, right, like, everything that you speak around, how do you talk to different ecosystem? That, actually, MinIO provides connectors; having the large ecosystem support and large community, we are able to address all that. Once you bring MinIO into your application stack like you would bring Elasticsearch or MongoDB or anything else as a container, your application stack is just a Kubernetes YAML file, and you roll it out on any cloud, it becomes easier for them, they're able to go to any cloud they want. But the real reason why it succeeded was not that. They actually wrote their applications as containers on Minikube, then they will push it on a CI/CD environment.They never wrote code on EC2 or ECS writing objects on S3, and they don't like the idea of [past 00:08:15], where someone is telling you just—like you saw Google App Engine never took off, right? They liked the idea, here are my building blocks. And then I would stitch them together and build my application. We were part of their application development since early days, and when the application matured, it was hard to remove. It is very much like Microsoft Windows when it grew, even though the desktop was Microsoft Windows Server was NetWare, NetWare lost the game, right?We got the ecosystem, and it was actually developer productivity, convenience, that really helped. The simplicity of MinIO, today, they are arguing that deploying MinIO inside AWS is easier through their YAML and containers than going to AWS Console and figuring out how to do it.Corey: As you take a look at how customers are adopting this, it's clear that there is some shift in this because I could see the story for something like MinIO making an awful lot of sense in a data center environment because otherwise, it's, “Great. I need to make this app work with my SAN as well as an object store.” And that's sort of a non-starter for obvious reasons. But now you're available through cloud marketplaces directly.AB: Yeah.Corey: How are you seeing adoption patterns and interactions from customers changing as the industry continues to evolve?AB: Yeah, actually, that is how my thinking was when I started. If you are inside AWS, I would myself tell them that why don't use AWS S3? And it made a lot of sense if it's on a colo or your own infrastructure, then there is an object store. It even made a lot of sense if you are deploying on Google Cloud, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud, it made a lot of sense because you wanted an S3 compatible object store. Inside AWS, why would you do it, if there is AWS S3?Nowadays, I hear funny arguments, too. They like, “Oh, I didn't know that I could use S3. Is S3 MinIO compatible?” Because they will be like, “It came along with the GitLab or GitHub Enterprise, a part of the application stack.” They didn't even know that they could actually switch it over.And otherwise, most of the time, they developed it on MinIO, now they are too lazy to switch over. That also happens. But the real reason that why it became serious for me—I ignored that the public cloud commercialization; I encouraged the community adoption. And it grew to more than a million instances, like across the cloud, like small and large, but when they start talking about paying us serious dollars, then I took it seriously. And then when I start asking them, why would you guys do it, then I got to know the real reason why they wanted to do was they want to be detached from the cloud infrastructure provider.They want to look at cloud as CPU network and drive as a service. And running their own enterprise IT was more expensive than adopting public cloud, it was productivity for them, reducing the infrastructure, people cost was a lot. It made economic sense.Corey: Oh, people always cost more the infrastructure itself does.AB: Exactly right. 70, 80%, like, goes into people, right? And enterprise IT is too slow. They cannot innovate fast, and all of those problems. But what I found was for us, while we actually build the community and customers, if you're on AWS, if you're running MinIO on EBS, EBS is three times more expensive than S3.Corey: Or a single copy of it, too, where if you're trying to go multi-AZ and you have the replication traffic, and not to mention you have to over-provision it, which is a bit of a different story as well. So, like, it winds up being something on the order of 30 times more expensive, in many cases, to do it right. So, I'm looking at this going, the economics of running this purely by itself in AWS don't make sense to me—long experience teaches me the next question of, “What am I missing?” Not, “That's ridiculous and you're doing it wrong.” There's clearly something I'm not getting. What am I missing?AB: I was telling them until we made some changes, right—because we saw a couple of things happen. I was initially like, [unintelligible 00:12:00] does not make 30 copies. It makes, like, 1.4x, 1.6x.But still, the underlying block storage is not only three times more expensive than S3, it's also slow. It's a network storage. Trying to put an object store on top of it, another, like, software-defined SAN, like EBS made no sense to me. Smaller deployments, it's okay, but you should never scale that on EBS. So, it did not make economic sense. I would never take it seriously because it would never help them grow to scale.But what changed in recent times? Amazon saw that this was not only a problem for MinIO-type players. Every database out there today, every modern database, even the message queues like Kafka, they all have gone scale-out. And they all depend on local block store and putting a scale-out distributed database, data processing engines on top of EBS would not scale. And Amazon introduced storage optimized instances. Essentially, that reduced to bet—the data infrastructure guy, data engineer, or application developer asking IT, “I want a SuperMicro, or Dell server, or even virtual machines.” That's too slow, too inefficient.They can provision these storage machines on demand, and then I can do it through Kubernetes. These two changes, all the public cloud players now adopted Kubernetes as the standard, and they have to stick to the Kubernetes API standard. If they are incompatible, they won't get adopted. And storage optimized that is local drives, these are machines, like, [I3 EN 00:13:23], like, 24 drives, they have SSDs, and fast network—like, 25-gigabit 200-gigabit type network—availability of these machines, like, what typically would run any database, HDFS cluster, MinIO, all of them, those machines are now available just like any other EC2 instance.They are efficient. You can actually put MinIO side by side to S3 and still be price competitive. And Amazon wants to—like, just like their retail marketplace, they want to compete and be open. They have enabled it. In that sense, Amazon is actually helping us. And it turned out that now I can help customers build multiple petabyte infrastructure on Amazon and still stay efficient, still stay price competitive.Corey: I would have said for a long time that if you were to ask me to build out the lingua franca of all the different cloud providers into a common API, the S3 API would be one of them. Now, you are building this out, multi-cloud, you're in all three of the major cloud marketplaces, and the way that you do that and do those deployments seems like it is the modern multi-cloud API of Kubernetes. When you first started building this, Kubernetes was very early on. What was the evolution of getting there? Or were you one of the first early-adoption customers in a Kubernetes space?AB: So, when we started, there was no Kubernetes. But we saw the problem was very clear. And there was containers, and then came Docker Compose and Swarm. Then there was Mesos, Cloud Foundry, you name it, right? Like, there was many solutions all the way up to even VMware trying to get into that space.And what did we do? Early on, I couldn't choose. I couldn't—it's not in our hands, right, who is going to be the winner, so we just simply embrace everybody. It was also tiring that to allow implement native connectors to all of them different orchestration, like Pivotal Cloud Foundry alone, they have their own standard open service broker that's only popular inside their system. Go outside elsewhere, everybody was incompatible.And outside that, even, Chef Ansible Puppet scripts, too. We just simply embraced everybody until the dust settle down. When it settled down, clearly a declarative model of Kubernetes became easier. Also Kubernetes developers understood the community well. And coming from Borg, I think they understood the right architecture. And also written in Go, unlike Java, right?It actually matters, these minute new details resonating with the infrastructure community. It took off, and then that helped us immensely. Now, it's not only Kubernetes is popular, it has become the standard, from VMware to OpenShift to all the public cloud providers, GKS, AKS, EKS, whatever, right—GKE. All of them now are basically Kubernetes standard. It made not only our life easier, it made every other [ISV 00:16:11], other open-source project, everybody now can finally write one code that can be operated portably.It is a big shift. It is not because we chose; we just watched all this, we were riding along the way. And then because we resonated with the infrastructure community, modern infrastructure is dominated by open-source. We were also the leading open-source object store, and as Kubernetes community adopted us, we were naturally embraced by the community.Corey: Back when AWS first launched with S3 as its first offering, there were a bunch of folks who were super excited, but object stores didn't make a lot of sense to them intrinsically, so they looked into this and, “Ah, I can build a file system and users base on top of S3.” And the reaction was, “Holy God don't do that.” And the way that AWS decided to discourage that behavior is a per request charge, which for most workloads is fine, whatever, but there are some that causes a significant burden. With running something like MinIO in a self-hosted way, suddenly that costing doesn't exist in the same way. Does that open the door again to so now I can use it as a file system again, in which case that just seems like using the local file system, only with extra steps?AB: Yeah.Corey: Do you see patterns that are emerging with customers' use of MinIO that you would not see with the quote-unquote, “Provider's” quote-unquote, “Native” object storage option, or do the patterns mostly look the same?AB: Yeah, if you took an application that ran on file and block and brought it over to object storage, that makes sense. But something that is competing with object store or a layer below object store, that is—end of the day that drives our block devices, you have a block interface, right—trying to bring SAN or NAS on top of object store is actually a step backwards. They completely missed the message that Amazon told that if you brought a file system interface on top of object store, you missed the point, that you are now bringing the legacy things that Amazon intentionally removed from the infrastructure. Trying to bring them on top doesn't make it any better. If you are arguing from a compatibility some legacy applications, sure, but writing a file system on top of object store will never be better than NetApp, EMC, like EMC Isilon, or anything else. Or even GlusterFS, right?But if you want a file system, I always tell the community, they ask us, “Why don't you add an FS option and do a multi-protocol system?” I tell them that the whole point of S3 is to remove all those legacy APIs. If I added POSIX, then I'll be a mediocre object storage and a terrible file system. I would never do that. But why not write a FUSE file system, right? Like, S3Fs is there.In fact, initially, for legacy compatibility, we wrote MinFS and I had to hide it. We actually archived the repository because immediately people started using it. Even simple things like end of the day, can I use Unix [Coreutils 00:19:03] like [cp, ls 00:19:04], like, all these tools I'm familiar with? If it's not file system object storage that S3 [CMD 00:19:08] or AWS CLI is, like, to bloatware. And it's not really Unix-like feeling.Then what I told them, “I'll give you a BusyBox like a single static binary, and it will give you all the Unix tools that works for local filesystem as well as object store.” That's where the [MC tool 00:19:23] came; it gives you all the Unix-like programmability, all the core tool that's object storage compatible, speaks native object store. But if I have to make object store look like a file system so UNIX tools would run, it would not only be inefficient, Unix tools never scaled for this kind of capacity.So, it would be a bad idea to take step backwards and bring legacy stuff back inside. For some very small case, if there are simple POSIX calls using [ObjectiveFs 00:19:49], S3Fs, and few, for legacy compatibility reasons makes sense, but in general, I would tell the community don't bring file and block. If you want file and block, leave those on virtual machines and leave that infrastructure in a silo and gradually phase them out.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: So, my big problem, when I look at what S3 has done is in it's name because of course, naming is hard. It's, “Simple Storage Service.” The problem I have is with the word simple because over time, S3 has gotten more and more complex under the hood. It automatically tiers data the way that customers want. And integrated with things like Athena, you can now query it directly, whenever of an object appears, you can wind up automatically firing off Lambda functions and the rest.And this is increasingly looking a lot less like a place to just dump my unstructured data, and increasingly, a lot like this is sort of a database, in some respects. Now, understand my favorite database is Route 53; I have a long and storied history of misusing services as databases. Is this one of those scenarios, or is there some legitimacy to the idea of turning this into a database?AB: Actually, there is now S3 Select API that if you're storing unstructured data like CSV, JSON, Parquet, without downloading even a compressed CSV, you can actually send a SQL query into the system. IN MinIO particularly the S3 Select is [CMD 00:21:16] optimized. We can load, like, every 64k worth of CSV lines into registers and do CMD operations. It's the fastest SQL filter out there. Now, bringing these kinds of capabilities, we are just a little bit away from a database; should we do database? I would tell definitely no.The very strength of S3 API is to actually limit all the mutations, right? Particularly if you look at database, they're dealing with metadata, and querying; the biggest value they bring is indexing the metadata. But if I'm dealing with that, then I'm dealing with really small block lots of mutations, the separation of objects storage should be dealing with persistence and not mutations. Mutations are [AWS 00:21:57] problem. Separation of database work function and persistence function is where object storage got the storage right.Otherwise, it will, they will make the mistake of doing POSIX-like behavior, and then not only bringing back all those capabilities, doing IOPS intensive workloads across the HTTP, it wouldn't make sense, right? So, object storage got the API right. But now should it be a database? So, it definitely should not be a database. In fact, I actually hate the idea of Amazon yielding to the file system developers and giving a [file three 00:22:29] hierarchical namespace so they can write nice file managers.That was a terrible idea. Writing a hierarchical namespace that's also sorted, now puts tax on how the metadata is indexed and organized. The Amazon should have left the core API very simple and told them to solve these problems outside the object store. Many application developers don't need. Amazon was trying to satisfy everybody's need. Saying no to some of these file system-type, file manager-type users, what should have been the right way.But nevertheless, adding those capabilities, eventually, now you can see, S3 is no longer simple. And we had to keep that compatibility, and I hate that part. I actually don't mind compatibility, but then doing all the wrong things that Amazon is adding, now I have to add because it's compatible. I kind of hate that, right?But now going to a database would be pushing it to the whole new level. Here is the simple reason why that's a bad idea. The right way to do database—in fact, the database industry is already going in the right direction. Unstructured data, the key-value or graph, different types of data, you cannot possibly solve all that even in a single database. They are trying to be multimodal database; even they are struggling with it.You can never be a Redis, Cassandra, like, a SQL all-in-one. They tried to say that but in reality, that you will never be better than any one of those focused database solutions out there. Trying to bring that into object store will be a mistake. Instead, let the databases focus on query language implementation and query computation, and leave the persistence to object store. So, object store can still focus on storing your database segments, the table segments, but the index is still in the memory of the database.Even the index can be snapshotted once in a while to object store, but use objects store for persistence and database for query is the right architecture. And almost all the modern databases now, from Elasticsearch to [unintelligible 00:24:21] to even Kafka, like, message queue. They all have gone that route. Even Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, Vertica, name it, Splunk, they all have gone object storage route, too. Snowflake itself is a prime example, BigQuery and all of them.That's the right way. Databases can never be consolidated. There will be many different kinds of databases. Let them specialize on GraphQL or Graph API, or key-value, or SQL. Let them handle the indexing and persistence, they cannot handle petabytes of data. That [unintelligible 00:24:51] to object store is how the industry is shaping up, and it is going in the right direction.Corey: One of the ways I learned the most about various services is by talking to customers. Every time I think I've seen something, this is amazing. This service is something I completely understand. All I have to do is talk to one more customer. And when I was doing a bill analysis project a couple of years ago, I looked into a customer's account and saw a bucket with okay, that has 280 billion objects in it—and wait was that billion with a B?And I asked them, “So, what's going on over there?” And there's, “Well, we built our own columnar database on top of S3. This may not have been the best approach.” It's, “I'm going to stop you there. With no further context, it was not, but please continue.”It's the sort of thing that would never have occurred to me to even try, do you tend to see similar—I would say they're anti-patterns, except somehow they're made to work—in some of your customer environments, as they are using the service in ways that are very different than ways encouraged or even allowed by the native object store options?AB: Yeah, when I first started seeing the database-type workloads coming on to MinIO, I was surprised, too. That was exactly my reaction. In fact, they were storing these 256k, sometimes 64k table segments because they need to index it, right, and the table segments were anywhere between 64k to 2MB. And when they started writing table segments, it was more often [IOPS-type 00:26:22] I/O pattern, then a throughput-type pattern. Throughput is an easier problem to solve, and MinIO always saturated these 100-gigabyte NVMe-type drives, they were I/O intensive, throughput optimized.When I started seeing the database workloads, I had to optimize for small-object workloads, too. We actually did all that because eventually I got convinced the right way to build a database was to actually leave the persistence out of database; they made actually a compelling argument. If historically, I thought metadata and data, data to be very big and coming to object store make sense. Metadata should be stored in a database, and that's only index page. Take any book, the index pages are only few, database can continue to run adjacent to object store, it's a clean architecture.But why would you put database itself on object store? When I saw a transactional database like MySQL, changing the [InnoDB 00:27:14] to [RocksDB 00:27:15], and making changes at that layer to write the SS tables [unintelligible 00:27:19] to MinIO, and then I was like, where do you store the memory, the journal? They said, “That will go to Kafka.” And I was like—I thought that was insane when it started. But it continued to grow and grow.Nowadays, I see most of the databases have gone to object store, but their argument is, the databases also saw explosive growth in data. And they couldn't scale the persistence part. That is where they realized that they still got very good at the indexing part that object storage would never give. There is no API to do sophisticated query of the data. You cannot peek inside the data, you can just do streaming read and write.And that is where the databases were still necessary. But databases were also growing in data. One thing that triggered this was the use case moved from data that was generated by people to now data generated by machines. Machines means applications, all kinds of devices. Now, it's like between seven billion people to a trillion devices is how the industry is changing. And this led to lots of machine-generated, semi-structured, structured data at giant scale, coming into database. The databases need to handle scale. There was no other way to solve this problem other than leaving the—[unintelligible 00:28:31] if you looking at columnar data, most of them are machine-generated data, where else would you store? If they tried to build their own object storage embedded into the database, it would make database mentally complicated. Let them focus on what they are good at: Indexing and mutations. Pull the data table segments which are immutable, mutate in memory, and then commit them back give the right mix. What you saw what's the fastest step that happened, we saw that consistently across. Now, it is actually the standard.Corey: So, you started working on this in 2014, and here we are—what is it—eight years later now, and you've just announced a Series B of $100 million dollars on a billion-dollar valuation. So, it turns out this is not just one of those things people are using for test labs; there is significant momentum behind using this. How did you get there from—because everything you're saying makes an awful lot of sense, but it feels, at least from where I sit, to be a little bit of a niche. It's a bit of an edge case that is not the common case. Obviously, I missing something because your investors are not the types of sophisticated investors who see something ridiculous and, “Yep. That's the thing we're going to go for.” There right more than they're not.AB: Yeah. The reason for that was the saw what we were set to do. In fact, these are—if you see the lead investor, Intel, they watched us grow. They came into Series A and they saw, everyday, how we operated and grew. They believed in our message.And it was actually not about object store, right? Object storage was a means for us to get into the market. When we started, our idea was, ten years from now, what will be a big problem? A lot of times, it's hard to see the future, but if you zoom out, it's hidden in plain sight.These are simple trends. Every major trend pointed to world producing more data. No one would argue with that. If I solved one important problem that everybody is suffering, I won't go wrong. And when you solve the problem, it's about building a product with fine craftsmanship, attention to details, connecting with the user, all of that standard stuff.But I picked object storage as the problem because the industry was fragmented across many different data stores, and I knew that won't be the case ten years from now. Applications are not going to adopt different APIs across different clouds, S3 to GCS to Azure Blob to HDFS to everything is incompatible. I saw that if I built a data store for persistence, industry will consolidate around S3 API. Amazon S3, when we started, it looked like they were the giant, there was only one cloud industry, it believed mono-cloud. Almost everyone was talking to me like AWS will be the world's data center.I certainly see that possibility, Amazon is capable of doing it, but my bet was the other way, that AWS S3 will be one of many solutions, but not—if it's all incompatible, it's not going to work, industry will consolidate. Our bet was, if world is producing so much data, if you build an object store that is S3 compatible, but ended up as the leading data store of the world and owned the application ecosystem, you cannot go wrong. We kept our heads low and focused on the first six years on massive adoption, build the ecosystem to a scale where we can say now our ecosystem is equal or larger than Amazon, then we are in business. We didn't focus on commercialization; we focused on convincing the industry that this is the right technology for them to use. Once they are convinced, once you solve business problems, making money is not hard because they are already sold, they are in love with the product, then convincing them to pay is not a big deal because data is so critical, central part of their business.We didn't worry about commercialization, we worried about adoption. And once we got the adoption, now customers are coming to us and they're like, “I don't want open-source license violation. I don't want data breach or data loss.” They are trying to sell to me, and it's an easy relationship game. And it's about long-term partnership with customers.And so the business started growing, accelerating. That was the reason that now is the time to fill up the gas tank and investors were quite excited about the commercial traction as well. And all the intangible, right, how big we grew in the last few years.Corey: It really is an interesting segment, that has always been something that I've mostly ignored, like, “Oh, you want to run your own? Okay, great.” I get it; some people want to cosplay as cloud providers themselves. Awesome. There's clearly a lot more to it than that, and I'm really interested to see what the future holds for you folks.AB: Yeah, I'm excited. I think end of the day, if I solve real problems, every organization is moving from compute technology-centric to data-centric, and they're all looking at data warehouse, data lake, and whatever name they give data infrastructure. Data is now the centerpiece. Software is a commodity. That's how they are looking at it. And it is translating to each of these large organizations—actually, even the mid, even startups nowadays have petabytes of data—and I see a huge potential here. The timing is perfect for us.Corey: I'm really excited to see this continue to grow. And I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?AB: I'm always on the community, right. Twitter and, like, I think the Slack channel, it's quite easy to reach out to me. LinkedIn. I'm always excited to talk to our users or community.Corey: And we will of course put links to this in the [show notes 00:33:58]. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.AB: Again, wonderful to be here, Corey.Corey: Anand Babu Periasamy, CEO and co-founder of MinIO. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with what starts out as an angry comment but eventually turns into you, in your position on the S3 product team, writing a thank you note to MinIO for helping validate your market.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
Hacker History sits down with Greg Ferro AKA EtherealMind. We learn how Greg started his podcast and blogging empire back before most people even know what podcasting and blogging was. We learn about the early days of networking, Netware vs SCO. working with dictaphones at a law office. Show Notes Greg's Twitter Packet Pushers Greg's […]
Hacker History sits down with Mike Goetzman to learn about his history. Mike is the person behind the CypherCon, the Wisconsin Hacker Conference. We learn about how Mike caused some trouble in school, got to help out as the "punishment", goes to school, meets his wife on ICQ. Mike traveled to Cuba to help spread […]
Kristoffer chats with Harald Achitz about Harald’s path as a developer, test-driven development, seeing the big picture, and more. The first part of the discussion is Harald’s background: Growing up on the far side of Europe, focusing on music, and how he eventually landed in computing. Freelancing as a developer in 1995 - what was that like? How did one find customers? The story then goes into Harald’s way into C and C++. Developing for medical devices and hospitals. Moving toward Linux, making a living as an open source developer, and eventually ending up in Sweden. Then, the conversation moves to Harald’s increasing interest in what happens after you finish writing the code; builds, releases, integrations, package managers, build systems, and so much more. We talk quite a bit about seeing the big picture, and how our code is, at best, a temporary and unimportant part of the greater whole. Are we too focused on the next task, at the expense of thinking about and seeing the whole? Harald explains why he likes to have 100% code coverage, how he goes about setting up his tests, and the challenges of setting up tests when responsibilities strech across teams. Many of the hardest problems are organizational, the code we write is, on the whole, often not very important. Code is temporary. All of which is more motivation for testing more. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Harald Stockholmcpp - C++ meetup which Harald arranges Tron Wargames The Iron curtain Conservatorium Visual basic for applications Novell netware Windows 95 Windows NT 3.51 Office 95 Lotus notes Microsoft press Access AS/400 Stored procedures DCOM MSDN KDE GNOME Red hat Slackware “Linux is cancer” Tobii Conan C and C++ package manager Jenkins Unit testing Test-driven development Boost unit test Github actions Scrum Devops Spock - testing and specification framework for Java, Nimoy - for Python Schrödinger’s cat Titles Austria in the 80s On the side of Europe I started and stopped a lot of things Just jamming around Where you play the songs you hate There were computers in offices I was the young person The internet became a thing Freelancing back in 95 I really loved databases I came back to medical devices Would you like to go to Switzerland? A different spirit in the Linux world I have no problem if things work It’s not just the code I write I love to have everything automated Holistic thinking All the tests are passing, but the thing is not useful Yes, it gives me no guarantee You need to fake it The place where people give up Software is their bread and butter The code I write is most likely not very important Software systems tend to change Code is temporary Throw it away as soon as possible Never enough, but always too much
Hacker History sits down with Mark Loveless AKA Simple Nomad. We start our story by buying a bluebox from Woz and Steve Jobs. Mark picks up his handle from the supernatural. We learn of the time scanned the IP space of China to test a security scanner and gain some unwanted attention. Show Notes Simple […]
Rust for the Linux kernel: https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux Linus opinion on C++ in the Linux kernel: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/1/20/20 gdb: https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb lldb: https://lldb.llvm.org Novell's Netware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare strace: https://strace.io ltrace: http://www.ltrace.org DTrace: http://dtrace.org/blogs/about ptrace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptrace#Linux Capabilities: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/capabilities Extended attributes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes#L inux eBPF: https://ebpf.io BCC: https://github.com/iovisor/bcc BCC toolchain: https://iovisor.github.io/bcc Linux kernel tracing: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/trace/index.html Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon s_of_Math_Destruction Audacity: https://manual.audacityteam.org Jitsi (Meet): https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
The earliest days of the video game industry were, to put it lightly, a wild west of new technology We all know Atari, and I'm sure plenty of folks know about Coleco, but among the competitors was a company known as APF, and their machines -- the MP1000 and later the Imagination Machine -- helped define that first generation. And we have people like engineer Ed Smith to thank for that. Ed grew up like any other black kid in New York City's Brownsville, a tough community that exists as a testament to the power of systemic discrimination, crime, and a lack of opportunity. Like many engineers before him (such as Jerry Lawson), Ed eventually fell in love with the satisfaction and pride of taking machines apart and putting them back together, and it's that passion and hard work that drove him to a career at companies like APF, Netware creators Novell, and even Apple. But it wasn't until recent years that Ed even felt comfortable sharing his experiences and wisdom, thanks to a self-imposed belief that no one would believe a guy like him was ever responsible for such a cool thing. It took until 2016, when Ed's story was featured in FastCompany, for him to realize that his story had value. And so, Ed Smith wrote his memoir, appropriately titled “Imagine That: The story of Ed Smith, one of the first African Americans to work in the design of video games and personal computers. And folks, I know I hype up a lot of episodes. It's my job, but this truly was one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever had the privilege of having. Not only does Smith provide an engaging look at those early years of the video game wars, he illustrates a massively compelling look at how the African American community he grew up in shaped him, the way he lives his life, and the way he championed his own intelligence and drive throughout his career. The video game and tech industries of course still struggle to diversify themselves, but as with all history, it behooves us to learn it so we can imagine a better future. Buy Ed Smith's memoir, Imagine That: https://www.amazon.com/Imagine-That-Americans-personal-computers-ebook/dp/B0846535TR Follow The 1099: @ The1099Podcast on Twitter Follow Joe: @ JosephKnoop on Twitter Music by: ZWBuckley.com
Geeks Reminiscing — Looking back over aged (tech) shoulders JD Marymee (Microsoft HQ Seattle | Applied Innovation Architect, Professional Flight Instructor and Author) JD and I met in the USA in 1996 when I started working at Novell’s Utah (Provo) HQ. His tech background and experience is jaw-dropping! JD’s history covers some of the most pivotal technology milestones in our industry and the various pioneers he engaged during those times. Listen in as we casually throw back to some of those fascinating instances, do some BIG name dropping and he shares his views on Blockchain. Unfortunately I couldn’t keep him talking longer (because he had to jump on a call with NASA and Starlink) but I’m sure (the older) geeks out there will love hearing some of this tech history. Consider this Part I : I promise to bring him back to surface more of this history chronologically. There is SO much he still has to share! Connect with JD on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmarymee/ Follow Stafford on Twitter https://twitter.com/staffordmasie Connect with Stafford on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stafford-masie-69489726/ When you're ready to #BeHeard, contact the podcast specialists at
Corona-matthet Fredrik är inne på sin andra vecka rent hemmajobb Jocke inne på sin första vecka av rent hemmajobb Minnen av forna tiders USB-hubbar Fredrik tillbringade helgen ute i solen, satte ner foten, besökte vårdcentralen Fredrik väcker sin tolvtums-Powerbook. Mysfaktorn finns kvar. Textmate, tangentbord, ljudet av snurrande disk och utseendet på Mac OS X 10.5. Jocke väcker sin tolvtums-Powerbook. Disken är död och DVD:n har en skiva som vägrar komma ut. Fram med skruvmejseln…. till nästa vecka. Apple släpper ny Ipad, och framför allt nytt tangentbord med trackpad. Jocke halvsugen.. fast… ? Fredrik har installerat IOS 13.4 på sin iPad minsann… Jocke har inte mycket på sina datorer längre Apple släpper ny Air, Fredrik hade köpt om hans Macbook dog idag (och batteriet tycker att det behöver service igen). Om inte nya Ipad får möjlighet att koda och podda förstås Diskussion om POWER-plattformen i vår chatt. Varför ska man ens överväga nåt annat än x86 eller ARM? Albert Uderzo, Asterix skapare, har lämnat oss. Jocke hämtar mer loot. Novell Netware-kartonger och böcker, fler US Robotics-modem, en låda med minnen, osv. En del ska ges bort så håll ögonen öppna i vår chattkanal. Jocke sugen på att koppla upp modemlinjer till sin BBS igen. Helt onödigt, givetvis FÖNSTER MOT TV-VÄRLDEN: Devs - ny serie som ser ytterst lovande ut. Jocke har inte hunnit titta ännu. Picard S1 går mot sitt slut - Jocke ligger efter. Fredrik? J har inte hunnit se Westworld heller. Fredrik har, såklart, inte lyckats se något alls Länkar Kolloidalt silver Tolvtums Powebook * Apple extended keyboard II Hur muspekaren (med mera) funkar i IOS 13.4 Nya Ipad Magic keyboard för Ipad Prompt Nya Macbook air Lineageos 16 Android 9 POWER-processorer SPARC Albert Uderzo Novell netware Picard Westworld, säsong 3 Devs, strömmas på Hulu Peertube Två nördar - en podcast. Fredrik Björeman och Joacim Melin diskuterar allt som gör livet värt att leva. Fullständig avsnittsinformation finns här: https://www.bjoremanmelin.se/podcast/avsnitt-202-egen-modempool-pa-gang.html.
Windows 95 Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today's episode is the third installment of our Microsoft Windows series, covering Windows 95. Windows 1 was released in 1985 and Windows 3 came along a few years later. At the time, Windows 95 was huge. I can remember non-technical people talking about how it was 32-bit. There was a huge media event. Microsoft paid massive amounts to bring the press in from all over the world. They promised a lot. They made a huge bet. And it paid off. After all this time, no single OS has come with as much fanfare or acclaim. Codenamed Chicago, development began back in 1992 alongside Cairo, which would be NT 4. New processors and memory had continued getting faster, smaller, and cheaper trending along Moore's law. The Intel 80486 was out now, and RAM was actually in the megabytes. Microsoft required a 386 and 4 megabytes of memory but recommended one of those 486 chips and 8 megabytes of memory. And the 32-bit OS promised to unlock all that speed for a better experience that was on par, if not better, than anything on the market at the time. And it showed in gaming. Suddenly DirectX and new video options unlocked an experience that has evolved into the modern era. Protected Mode programs also had preemptive multitasking, a coup at the time. Some of those were virtual device drivers or vxds. Windows 95 kinda' sat on top of DOS but when Windows loaded, the virtual machine manager coordinated a lot of the low-level functions of the machine for The New Shell as they called it at the time. And that new GUI was pretty fantastic. It introduced the world to that little row of icons known as the Taskbar. It introduced the Start menu, so we could find the tools we needed more easily. That Start Menu triggered an ad campaign that heavily used the Start Me Up hit from The Rolling Stones. Jennifer Anniston and Matthew Perry showcased a $300 million dollar ad campaign. There were stories on the news of people waiting in lines that wrapped around computer stores. They had the Empire State Building fly the Microsoft Windows colors. They sold 4 million copies in 4 days and within a couple of years held nearly 60% of the operating system market share. This sparked a run from computer manufacturers to ship devices that had Windows 95 OEM versions pre-installed. And they earned that market share, bringing massive advancements to desktop computing. We got the Graphics Device Interface, or GDI and user.exe, which managed the windows, menus, and buttons. The desktop metaphor was similar to the Mac but the underpinnings had become far more advanced at the time. And the Stones weren't the only musicians involved in Windows 95. Brian Eno composed all 6 seconds of the startup sound, which was eventually called The Microsoft Sound. It was a threaded OS. Many of the internals were still based on 16-bit Windows 3.1 executables. In fact while many hardware components could use built-in or even custom 32-bit drivers, it could fallback to generic 16-but drivers, making it easier to get started and use. One was it was easier to use was the Plug and Play wizards that prompted you to install those drivers when new hardware was detected. At release time the file system still used FAT16 and so was limited to 2 gigabytes in drive sizes. But you could have 255 character file names. And we got Windows Briefcase to sync files to disks so we could sneakernet them between computers. The program manager was no longer necessary. You could interact with the explorer desktop and have a seamless experience interacting with files and applications. Windows 95 was made for networking. It shipped with TCP/IP which by then was the way most people connected to the Internet. It also came with IPX/SPX so you could access the Netware file servers it seemed everyone had at the time. These features and how simple they suddenly were as impactful to the rise of the Internet as were the AOL disks floating around all over the place. Microsoft also released MSN alongside Windows 95, offering users a dial-up service to compete with those AOL disks. And Windows 95 brought us Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser by installing Windows 95's Plus! Installation pack, which also included themes. Unix had provided support for multiple users for awhile. But Windows 95 also gave us a multi-user operating system for consumers. Sure, the security paradigm wasn't complete but it was a start. And importantly users started getting accustomed to working in these types of environments. Troubleshooting was a thing. Suddenly you had GUI-level control of IRQs and Windows 95 gave us Safe Mode, making it easy to bypass all those drivers and startup items, since most boot problems were their fault and all. I remember the first time I installed 95. We didn't have machines that could use the CD-ROM that the OS came with so we had to use floppy disks. It took 13. We got CD-ROMs before installing 95 on more computers. It was the first time I saw people change desktop backgrounds just to mess with us. Normally there were inappropriate images involved. Windows 95 would receive a number of updates. These included Service Release 2 in 1996 which brought us FAT32, which which allowed for 2 terabyte partitions. It wasn't an easy process to move from fat16 to fat32 so I remember a lot of people just installing another drive and mapping the d drive to it. The Internet Explorer 4 update even brought us into the Active Desktop era, giving way to many of the Bill Gates demands from his famous “The Internet Tidal Wave” memo. And the Internet certainly came. And Microsoft sat able to dominate the market for over 20 years. They built an acceptable operating system with Windows 1. They built a good operating system in Windows 3. They built a great operating system in Windows 95. The competition had been fierce. The Mac might have in some ways been better and in many ways, been the inspiration. But Microsoft out-maneuvered Apple. OS/2 3.0 or “OS/2 Warp” might have been a great OS. But Microsoft out-marketed the company sending them into a tailspin that resulted in layoffs. Hardware had to work with the new Microsoft plug and play paradigm, or it would die a fiery death in the market. Microsoft had paid careful attention in building DOS and all the other DOS makers were soon to be out of business, sending Gary Kildall of CP/M into alcoholism and by then, dead. Everyone standing in Microsoft's way had been defeated. Not defeated, crushed, destroyed. If you've played Civilization it's terribly difficult to win if you don't destroy at least a couple of the other empires. And for a long time, Microsoft was able to give us a number of great innovations and push the market forward. This is all as impressive as it is sad. Following a lull in innovation, Microsoft left the door to the operating system market open for a resurgence of Apple and the new player, Google. They built sub-par mobile operating systems that just didn't resonate. And the market was ready for a shift, anyway. And they got it. And so today, we have competition again, and so Microsoft has become innovative again. Their APIs are amongst the best in my opinion. I've worked with developers who built me a graph API endpoint and shipped it over a weekend. So they're also inspired. Maybe market domination is good for a little while, to solidify the market. But as we've seen time and time again, markets need diversity. Otherwise vendors get complacent. And so think about this… What vendors are overly dominant and complacent today? Is it time. Maybe. That you disrupt them? If so, count me as an ally! So thank you for joining us for this episode and thank you for your innovations, I hope I get to do an episode on them soon! Have a great day.
Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we're able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of Novell. To understand Novell, we'll go to BYU in 1980. As an honors grad in math and computer science, Drew Major might have been listening to the new wave tunes of Blondie or Deve who released Call Me and Whip it respectively that year. But it's more likely he was playing with the Rubik's Cube or Pac-Man, released that year or tuned in to find out Who Shot JR? On Dallas. He probably joined the rest of the world in mourning the loss of John Lennon who was murdered in 1980. He went to work at Eyring Research Institute (ERI) where he, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell decided to take some of their work from BYU and started working on the IPX and SPX network protocols and the NetWare operating system using the company name SuperSet Software. Meanwhile, George Canova, Darin Field, and Jack Davis had started a company called Novell a couple of years before, building microcomputers, or the equivalent of the PCs we use today. They weren't doing so well and Novell Data Systems decided they might be able to sell more computers by hooking them up together - so they hired the SuperSet team to help. The team Superset had worked on ARPANET projects while at the Eyring Research Institute The bankers stepped in and Jack Davis left, then Canova - and Raymond Noorda stepped in as CEO in 1982. In 1983 they released Novell NetWare. NetWare had the first real Network Operating System called ShareNet, which was based on a license to a Unix kernel they bought. While initially based on the Xerox Network System developed at Xerox PARC, they created Internetwork Packet Exchange, or IPX, and Sequenced Packet Exchange, or SPX, creating standards that would become common in most businesses in the subsequent decades. They joined Novell in 1983 and Major later became Chief Scientist. The 1980s were good to Novell. They released Netware 2 in 1986, becoming independent of the hardware and more modular. Servers could be connected through ARCNET, Ethernet, and Token Ring. They added fault tolerance options to remap bad blocks, added RAID support, and used a key card inserted in the ISA bus to license the software. And they immediately started working on Netware 3, which wouldn't be complete until 1990, with 3.11 setting the standard in network file sharing and when I first worked with Netware. Netware 3 was easier to install. It was 32-bit, allowed volumes up to a terabyte, and I remember this being cool at the time, you could add volume segments on the fly while the volume was mounted. Although growing the volume was always… in need of checking backups first. They didn't worry a lot about the GUI. Dealers didn't mind that. HP, DEC, and Data General all licensed OEM versions of the software. This was also my first experience with clustering, as NetWare SFT-III allowed a mirror an a different machine. All of this led to patents and the founding of new concepts that would, whether intentionally or accidentally, be copied by other vendors over the coming years. They grew, they sold hardware, like otherwise expensive ethernet cards, at cost to grab market share, and they had a lot of dealers who were loyal, in part due to great margins they had been earning but also because Netware wasn't simple to run and so required support contracts with those dealers. By 1990, most businesses used Novell if they needed to network computers. And NetWare 3.x seemed to cement that. They worked with larger and larger customers, becoming the Enterprise standard. Once upon a time, no one ever got fired for buying Netware. But Microsoft had been growing into the powerhouse standard of the day. They opened discussions to merge with Novell but Ray Noorda, then CEO, soon discovered that Bill Gates was working behind his back, a common theme of the era. This is when Novell got aggressive, likely realizing Microsoft was about to eat their lunch. Novell then bought Digital Research in 1991, with a version of DOS called DR DOS, and working with Apple on a project to bring Novell to Mac OS. They bought Univel to get their own Unix for UnixWare, and wrote Novell Directory Services which would later become eDirectory to establish a directory services play. They bought WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, early Office-type tools. By the end of this brisk acquisition time, the company didn't look like they did just a few years earlier. Microsoft had released Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server in 1993 as the hate-spat between Noorda and Gates intensified. Noorda supported the first FTC antitrust investigations against Microsoft. It didn't work. Noorda was replaced by Robert Frankenberg in 1994. And then Windows 95 was released. Novell ended up selling Novell DOS to Caldera, handing over part of the Unix assets to Santa Cruz Operation, selling Integrated Systems, scrapping the Embedded Systems technology they'd been working on, and even selling WordPerfect and Quattro Pro too Corel. Windows of course supported Netware servers in addition to their own offering, having moved to NT 4 in 1996. NT 4 server would become the de facto standard in businesses. Frankenberg didn't last long and Eric Schmidt was hired as CEO in 1997. NetWare 5 was released in 1998 and I can still remember building zap packages to remove IPX/SPX in favor of TCP/IP. But the company was alienating the channel by squeezing margin out of them while simultaneously losing the war in the small business then the larger businesses to Microsoft, who kept making Windows Server better, and by 1999 I was trading my CNA (or Certified Novell Administrator) out for my first MCSE. After seeing the turnaround at IBM, Novell bought a consulting firm called Cambridge Technology Partners in 2001, replacing Schmidt with their CEO, Jack Messmen - and moving their corporate headquarters to Massachusetts. Drew Major finally left that year. The advancements he's overseen at Novell are legendary and resulted in technology research and patents that rival any other team in the industry. But the suits had a new idea. They pivoted to Linux, buying Ximian and SuSE in 2003, releasing Suse Linux Enterprise Server and then Novell Linux Desktop in 2004 and finally Open Enterprise Server in 2005. Does all of this seem like a rudderless ship? Yes, they wanted to pivot to Linux and compete with Microsoft, but they'd been through this before. Stop slapping yourself… Microsoft finally settled the competition by buying them off. They gave Novell $348 Million dollars in 2006 for “patent cooperation” and then spent $6M more on Novell products than Novell spent on theirs over the next 5 years (keep in mind that technology spats are multi-front wars). Novell was acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion dollars. Because Novell engineers had been creating so much amazing technology all those years, 882 patents from Novell went to CPTN Holdings, a consortium of companies that included Apple, EMC, Microsoft, and Oracle - this consortium the likely architect of the whole deal. SUSE was spun off, Attachmate laid off a lot of the workforce, Attachmate was bought, much word salad was said. You can't go back in time and do things over. But if he could, I bet Noorda would go back in time and do the deal with Bill Gates instead of going to war. Think about that next time someone goes low. Don't let your emotions get the best of you. You're above that. This has been The History of Novell. Thank you for listening we hope you have a great day!
I got to interview Bernard Gleton. Growing up as a Detroit native, a passion for football took him from all-state in high school to an opportunity to play in the CFL without playing a down in college. An injury ended his substantial career, that was when he found a new passion in the IT field. Now with over a decade in the field, he has done everything from tech support and troubleshooting, to designing advanced network security. He is the founder of Netware Technical Solutions. This episode is brought to you by Nova Zora Digital. See what Nova Zora Digital can do for your business with digital marketing. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
In IT we know that the only constant is change. And for the most part, that's OK. What is difficult is when standards or processes are framed as immutable, and THEN they change. How do we adjust when the company spends $5million on a data center expansion, and then moves everything to the cloud 2 years later? Or when Windows abandons the GUI and goes to CLI, while Cisco moves away from IOS commands and on to GUI and API-driven interfaces? Does our religious/ethical/moral background help (or hinder) us from accepting and adapting to these moments in our work as IT pros? In this episode Kate, Josh, and Leon try to unpack the question and formulate some answers. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks! Kate: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion (or lack thereof). We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:49 Last week, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints made an announcement which sent shock waves through the Mormon community and tremors throughout many other religious communities as well. We'll get into the details about that in a minute. But it caused us here at Technically Religious to think about how supposedly immutable truths, whether we're talking about replacing Latin with English during mass or Microsoft's adoption of open source, affect us and how we deal with those changes. Joining the conversation today is Kate Asaff Kate: 01:17 Hello. Leon: 01:18 And Josh Biggley. Josh: 01:20 Yeah, it's still cold in Canada! Leon: 01:23 and I'm Leon Adato and it's slightly warmer here in Cleveland. So Josh, do us a favor and run us down just the main points of the announcement from last week. Josh: 01:34 Sure. So this announcement was made in early April, and in order to understand it, we have to go all the way back to November, 2015, and maybe even a little further. So the Organization of the Mormon Church, or the LDS church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is such that it's a top down organization. So the President, or prophet, of the church, he makes a declaration, often he has to get his two counselors and the other 12 men that sit on the quorum of the 12 apostles. And then those 15 men make these proclamations. So in November of 2015, the church released a policy internally, that was leaked, and then they had to address it publicly, that said that any child who had parents who were of the same gender, so you're in a same sex-relationship or a same-gender relationship or if you are trans-gendered - first, they were now labeled apostates. And that's really heavy language within any religious community. There's one thing to have transgressed, but there's another thing to be considered an apostate. And then in addition to them being an apostate, they also said that no child whose primary residence was with those same sex couples could receive any ordinances within the church. So that spans the entire gamut of: You could not be blessed as an infant within the church; to: you couldn't be baptized; to: if you were in the church - there are certain things that you that you undertake within Mormonism, you know, if you're a boy at the age of 12 (and now the age of 11) you can receive the priesthood - just things that you can't do, many of those rites of passage. So last week, and of course we're recording this in the early days of April, so last week the church came out and said, "Hey, that policy that was put into place in November of 2015? We're going to change that policy. And we're going to make it so that now if you are the child of an LGBTQ family, you can be baptized as an infant, you can be blessed within the church, under the understanding that of course the church is going to reach out to you and, throughout your lifetime because you are now officially a member of the church, once you're, once you're blessed and in the LDS church. That's a huge change because leadership within the church and members at large - admittedly myself prior to my transition away from Mormonism - defended that policy with a couple of talking points. First and foremost that the prophet, he specifies what is the will of God. He speaks for God. He's God's mouthpiece on earth. And second that this was an act of kindness, because we didn't want to - as a church - we didn't want to have people, with their children attending the Mormon church where the Mormon church was teaching that their parents were apostates. And then having to go home to their parents and say, "Hey mom and dad...", sorry... I got... hey, look at that. "Hey Mom and mom, dad and dad." Or "Hey, mom and dad, you know, dad and dad or mom and mom. You're an apostate." Or "You know, we think that you should be excommunicated." And all those horrible things that go along with that. So yeah, that's um, that was huge. I was pretty... I'll admit I was pretty pissed off on Thursday. Not because I disagree with the change that children should be allowed to join whatever church they want to regardless of their parents. I was just pissed off because lots of people put a lot of time and effort into setting aside their personal views and trying to make it so that they align with what they were being told from the top of the church. And then the church went, "Hey, by the way, we're going to change." Leon: 05:36 Right. And you'd actually mentioned in an earlier episode when we talked about opposing as you follow, you said that that was one of the things that caused you and your family to move away from the Mormon church for a while. And then you came back and you suffered censure and a bunch of other things for those views. So you directly experienced some of that just for expressing an opinion. Josh: 05:58 Yeah. And that actually goes back pretty far in my marriage. That goes back probably 15 years ago when that particular experience happened. I mean, just to give some context and then, and I know that we want to talk about this as a foundation for IT. And I think there's a great parallel. And Leon, thanks for calling it out. Harold B. Lee, who was the president of the church from July of 1972 until his death in December of 1973, he said this: "You may not like what comes from the authority of the Church. It may contradict your political views. It may contradict your social views. It may interfere with some of your social life. But if you listen to these things, as if from the mouth of the Lord himself, with patience and faith, the promise is that 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against you; yea, and the Lord God will disperse the powers of darkness from before you, and cause the heavens to shake for your good, and his name's glory." So, you know, pretty powerful language from the LDS church. Fortunately in IT, apart from Mac users, right Kate? Nobody thinks that their salvation from any of their other platforms. Leon: 07:09 I think actually, yeah, there is actually a Mac airbook that blocks the gates of hell. Kate: 07:14 It's actually an iPad. Leon: 07:18 Oh, of course. It would be. And that, with making a little bit of lighthearted humor is where I actually want to go, which is the IT aspects of that. But before we dig too far into that can we think - the three of us - can we think of any other analogs in religions that may have been that same kind of thing? Again, I'm not talking about the fact that things change. I'm talking about things that were supposedly immutable, or somewhat permanent, and then the group, the organization sort of pivoted away from it. And, and I brought up one which was the change from the Catholic mass from Latin to English, which you know, happened I think in the seventies, if I remember correctly? I could be wrong because I don't pay very much attention to that kind of stuff. But I remember that it caused quite a bit of a stir, Josh: 08:13 Yeah, the ordination of women in the United Methodist Church, which happened well before I was born back in the mid fifties is an interesting one. Again, linking it to Mormonism. A woman named Kate Kelly founded an organization called Ordain Women. She's a lawyer and an activist and she was excommunicated by the LDS church in June, 2014. So everyone kind of waits for the day in which women will be ordained within the Mormon church or within the the LDS church. I don't know if it's going to happen, but we certainly see that adopted. And that's a huge thing, right? Because traditionally, you know, as far back as tradition goes religions tended to be very patriarchal. Where, you know, men were the heads, the household, they were the heads of the church. And so for the United Methodist to allow women to be ordained officially, even though it had been doing it for a long time, unofficially. That was huge. Kate: 09:04 It kinda reminds me in the 90's when the Catholic Church decided to start allowing girls to be altar servers. I remember there was a cardinal in Boston who had saw these girls serving and before the proclamation came from the Vatican, the story I heard was that he told the congregation, "Get these girls out of here." He didn't want to see them serving and that it was something, obviously 20 years later it has stuck with me Leon: 09:34 With religion you have things that really are dogmatic. Sometimes we throw that word around somewhat flippantly but religion actually is dogmatic. It has, you know, strictures or rules that are, at least in the eyes of it, internally immutable. And so you've got that. But pivoting to the IT piece, I want to talk a little bit about, about that. What are some of those changes? It's not going to change and then it does and you have to suddenly cope with it. What are some of the ones that we've either heard about or experienced ourselves? Kate: 10:08 Well since you guys were poking fun of me a little bit earlier as being a devoted Apple fan girl I will bring up the 2006 when Apple changed from Motorola to Intel processors. That was a huge thing for the Apple community and you know, many of us had spent years structuring these complex arguments as to why RISC processors are better than CISC processors and you know, insisting that megahertz and gigahertz aren't true measures of processing power. And then all of a sudden, like everything for us was just blown away overnight. Now Macs were Intel based and we kind of had to let go of, you know, our are sworn allegiance to the Motorola chipset. Leon: 10:56 That's, I'm going to say funny, not funny ha ha, but I just had, I would never have expected that to be overwhelming to a community. But I can see that the way that you describe it, I can absolutely understand that you had an emotional investment in a particular hardware standard. Josh: 11:16 Yeah. Well, I think that functional workspace, right? You know, Kate, you talked about defending the position of you know, RISC processors. That's why it's good. That's why it's the thing that makes Apple as awesome as it is. And we all go through that. You know, I've been in the industry long enough that I remember walking into data centers and seeing literally big metal, there were mainframes sitting on the data center floor. The idea that we would virtualize? It blew people's minds and I was like, I thought that was a great idea. Let's virtualize, let's get density. I will admit to being a little slower to adopt a shift to cloud because it, it put in place some barriers to entry for me. When I started my career, I loved the idea of networking, although I'm not a networking engineer, but I loved the idea that you could plug in cables and lights would start blinking and things just work. You know, there was, there was a command line and I actually, I had a reputation for asking questions in class, like "How do you do that from the command line?" But it got beaten out of me. I was that guy. But it got beaten out of me because Windows was the thing, Windows and at the time, a Netware were the platforms for for server managers and that's where I was headed. We've made this swing to having to code, and I don't code, but everything is code now. Networking is code, storage code, servers are code, everything is code. I'm made a very firm stance early in my career that I didn't want to code because I wasn't good at it. I'm still not good at it. I feel like I'm fumbling with 14 hands tied behind my back. I don't know what the analogy is. I just feel dumb. I feel like I'm the guy smashing his face on his keyboard trying to make things work anytime I code. So I get it. Those shifts are hard, and they're not hard because we don't, I don't want to accept the shift to cloud. It's hard because it makes me address other deficiencies in myself that I don't know that I'm 100% ready to address. Speaker 1: 13:24 And I think that that's actually a good point is that the change, the changes themselves may not be so troublesome, but they address either inadequacies or perceived inadequacies in ourselves and we don't like that. We don't always like to have a mirror held up to it. Sometimes I think it's not that though. So given a quintessential example, and I think many of us in IT have experienced this, where on Monday the business says, "Hey, you know, this event is occurring," whether it's a merger or an acquisition or whatever it is, "but don't worry, nothing's going to change for you. Everything's going to be just fine." And then Friday, metaphorically, they say, "Oh, by the way, we're shutting down the location" or "You're being let go" or you know, "We're moving this entire department to merge with this other department" or whatever it is. And, whether it happens in days or weeks or months, "You first told me nothing was going to change. And then it did." And that's the part that I think a lot of us have a hard time coping with. Don't tell me that it's not going to change when you know full well that it is. Enough times in business, things change and everyone says, oh yeah, we had no way of knowing that was going to happen. Those changes are unpredictable and so you just deal with them. But when it's clearly predictable, that's the part I think that is more difficult for us in IT to deal with. And I think that's the whole point of vendors offering what's known as LTS, Long Term Support, for something, like "We promise we're not going to pull the rug out from under you for x years." Josh: 15:09 I want to make sure that we understand or at least that we agree that IT is not religion. Religion is not IT. There's certainly some overlap and are dogmatic beliefs on both sides of of the row. But I tweeted earlier today and I'm going to read it, "A gentle reminder that you are more than your nationality, favorite sports team, political party, or religious ideology. Be more than the sum of your parts. Be better than your weakest part. Be human." And I think that that applies to IT as well. You might have been the person who was responsible for gateway computers, probably cause you liked cows. I don't know. Just because that is what you've always done doesn't mean it's what you always need to do. You are more than capable of transitioning and learning something new. And a coworker of mine, Zach, if you're listening, shout out, he will, he will admit that I am not a great scripter, but I'm also more than capable of being taught how to be an okay scripter, you know? Under his tutelage, I've become kind of useful with powershell and I have even remotely built some shell scripts recently. So it's possible you can be something more than what you thought you always were. And that is really a beautiful thing, both in IT and in humanity. Leon: 16:31 And I've written about that in the past. And I probably will again in response to this podcast about that's actually not what you are. You might be, you know, a Cisco IOS command line jockey. You might be, you know, you might know everything there is to know about the Apple platform, whatever it is, but that's not actually what makes you a great IT professional. What makes you a great IT professional is your sensibilities. The fact that you understand how networking works, how hardware reacts with software, how architecture and design and you know an idea converts itself and moves through the pipeline into an actual product. Those are the things that make you a great IT practitioner and those things will persist even when the foundational platform - software or hardware - change. But again, just to drive it back again, the point is that, you know, we know things change, but when we are told something is not going to change and then it does, what do we do about that? So my question does our perspective, our outlook, whether it's religious or philosophical, whether it's moral or ethical, does that make it easier or harder to deal with? Kinds of events that you know, we promise it won't change it than it does. On the one hand, I could see someone saying that if you are heavily religious, you come from a strongly dogmatic frame of view, then you carry with you baggage of what "forever" means. And when a vendor or my employer says "It's never going to change, we are standardizing on x," and then they change. That can feel like a betrayal because I brought along, "No, no wait, you said the f word, "forever", so you know that means something to me and you just broke your promise." That could be much harder than somebody who might not have, like I said, that baggage coming along with it. I don't know what, what's your take on that? Kate: 18:36 We talked about this a little bit before, but what I found was interesting about that question was that as an atheist, I obviously have a somewhat fluid view of, you know, how the world works and how things are. I am also, technology-wise the quintessential early adopter. I'm the first day that it's available. I will consume it, upgraded, download it, in any way that I can get the new stuff. I'm on board. Josh: 19:03 So I think that that makes you Kate an IT relativist. There's this great thing within Mormonism about moral relativism and how it's such a bad thing, which that is a whole different discussion, but I think that the very best IT practitioners are those who can balance a bit of that. Conservativis... can't say that word... Conservativism plus that moral relativism within IT that you see the changes, you're willing to bring them in, but you do it in a way that requires that you parse them through your personal and your community experience and then say, "Yes, that's something we actually want to bring in to our enterprise. We're willing to adopt it." You need to know about it so that you can also say to someone who has read a shiny brochure or seen a vendor pitch about how amazing a product is and say, "Nope actually that's not something that we want to do and here's why." And being able to speak to a multitude of points. I think makes us great IT practitioners, if you are just that sole sourced individual who only knows about one technology, you're going to find yourself in some IT challenges. I've got a great friend, who coincidentally is also ex Mormon and his name is also Josh. Interesting point. It's interesting for me to listen to him talk about his challenges within his career. He's a great DBA. He is actually not just a DBA, but he designs databases and he's worked on a bunch of different areas and he has really struggled because he thinks that he's only in that data space. And I want to say to him, "Hey Josh," which is a little weird cause I'm calling my name, "Hey Josh, you need to understand that you're better than what you think that you are because first, you're willing to look at your career and figure out the parts that are really useful for you and you know where your weaknesses are." That, for me, is the big part. Are we willing to look at what we're doing today and understand both its strengths and weaknesses and then leverage the strengths and minimize the weaknesses by adopting other technologies? It would be kind of like me saying, "Hey, Mormonism is still really awesome," - which I do think. There are some wonderful things about Mormonism, but I also am willing to adopt some ideologies from Judaism. Thank you Leon. And I'm also willing and very open to adopting that moral relativism that comes along with atheism and other non traditional religious beliefs." Leon: 21:36 I definitely think, Kate, that we have a new topic idea on the horizon, which is whether or not being staunchly religious makes you more or less likely to be an early adopter of technology. I think as an IT person, I really want to solve that problem because I like new technology and I would hate to think that I'm predisposed as an Orthodox Jew to like not want to do the things. Of course I could be an outlier. I could. So Josh, to your point, I think that that IT is not like religion in the sense that no matter how strongly a vendor or an organization says that something is never going to change, it's gonna. Right? Yeah. I mean we just know that that's the nature of IT, is that things are going to change and probably sooner rather than later when you look at the long game. However, I think one of the things that makes this issue, you know - "It's not going to change," and then it does - similar in both religious and IT contexts is what we as people hope and expect from that event. Which is, I think, that whoever's making the change needs to be transparent about it. I think they need to be intellectually honest about it. And they need to be consistent about it. And what I mean by those things is that they need to say that "This change is happening. We saw it coming, even if we couldn't tell you at the time, but we're telling you now that we knew it was coming. We just had to," you know, whatever it was, the merger was coming, but we couldn't say anything because blah, blah, blah, legal, blah, blah, blah, Wall Street, whatever. Right? Um, it needs to be intellectually honest. We're doing this because it supports our brand values. It supports our corporate goals. It, you know, whatever. And it needs to be consistent. And I think most of all, if people were hurt by that first statement, this is the way it is. "This is the way it's always going to be." And then it changes. And people were hurt. You know, an example that happened a couple of jobs back for me: $5 million investment in a data center, building it out, putting tons of hardware in there, and then they moved to the cloud. What are you kidding me? Like, we just bought all this stuff and the company did say, "We know we hired a lot of you for your depth expertise in on-premises data center operations. And now we're asking, you - we're in fact demanding - that you move to a cloud based model. We know that some of you are going to be upset by this. Some of you may want to leave. We're going to support you in whatever decision you make, but this is the direction we're going. That kind of statement makes it a lot easier to accept the, "We never will... Oops. We are" kind of thing. And I think just to tie it back to our opening topic. I would hope, although I'm not in the community, but I would hope that a statement is made to the families that were hurt within the Mormon community for, you know, the years of being called, you know, apostates and all that stuff, and say "We're really sorry about this and we're going to do what we can to make it better." I would hope that that statement would be forthcoming. I guess time is going to tell. Josh: 24:55 Time will absolutely will. Unfortunately Mormonism does not have a history of apologizing. The unfortunate reality of some of the current leadership has come out specifically and said that the church does not ask for, nor does it offer apologies. Kate: 25:12 A long, long time ago I worked for MCI Worldcom and, if you recall, it is now Verizon business. It was sold to Verizon about 18 months after the CEO promised all of the employees that he was not looking to sell the company. MCI is also a huge company. It had definitely been in the works. So your comment about honesty really struck home with me. Nobody likes to be blindsided by change, but even more, nobody likes to be lied to about it. Josh: 25:45 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media. Kate: 25:59 To paraphrase and old Greek guy, "the only constant in IT is change."
Väder- och hälsorapporten Jocke installerar XP, var och varför? Och minns någon mer Rambus? Var är vår Discordkanal? Nu enklare att hitta! Jocke uppnår ett zenlikt tillstånd av insikt och grepp om Jekyll. Egen Git-server för synkning av bloggar mellan datorer är fina grejer. Iphone X mår inget vidare. Jocke överväger ominstallation Jocke är arg på Klarna. Igen. Fredrik åkte utför, drack sjukt gott kranvatten Är Jocke klar med Game engine black book: Doom? Vad var bäst? Det gick … helt okej … för Fria ligan att kickstarta Hindenburg. Vi funderar vidare kring varför varje låda till Mutant verkar bli ett komplett rollspel och Jocke försöker sätta fingret på varför han inte gillade Ur varselklotet-rollspelet Datormagazin Retro #3: den är på gång! Länkar Pentium 4 Hyper-threading RDRAM Rambus Geforce 2 AGP Windows XP Far cry Wing commander-spelen Wing commander: the kilrathi saga Frontdoor Chrome för XP Openarena Köp Quake III på Steam IOQuake3 Quake på IOS Discords backend är skrivet i Elixir, med mera Elixir Go Hugo Jekyll Wywallet Branäs Game engine black book: Doom 3DO IPX Novell netware Jez San Super FX-chipet Hindenburg-kickstartern Svavelvinter Ur varselklotet - rollspelet Datormagazin retro #3 Två nördar - en podcast. Fredrik Björeman och Joacim Melin diskuterar allt som gör livet värt att leva. Fullständig avsnittsinformation finns här: https://www.bjoremanmelin.se/podcast/avsnitt-155-jag-maste-prata-med-nagon-vuxen.html.
Detta senaste rafflande avsnitt diskuterar herrar Björeman och Melin Microsofts misslyckande patchning av Windows 7, en Netware-server med 16 års upptid, mer Mutant från Fria Ligan, Facebook och hur tjänsten stressar mer än underhåller, orimliga arbetsklimat, fantastiska Voyager 1, Pepsi med limesmak och Far Cry 5, och mycket mer. Länkar Länkar Microsoft patchade Spectre och Meltdown … nåja 16 års upptid: Netware 3.12 äger Anders Blixt Partisan - ett upphittat rollspel Undergångens arvtagare Mutant - 1984 års version Mutant 2 Brännpunkt Hindenburg Efter Ragnarök Tomas Arfert Mutant: Ad astra Facebooks informationsläcka Mark Zuckerberg ska frågas ut av kongressen Mozillas Facebook-plugin - Facebook container Under utveckling - Fredriks jobbpodd Johan i En podd om teknik Artikeln om Telltales arbetsklimat Telltale EA spouse var det, trots allt Att jobba ihjäl sig i reklambranschen - jobbigt och väldigt läsvärt Path var tidigt ute med att hamna i blåsväder för att samla på folks kontakter Facebook samlade data från Androidtelefoner så länge och mycket de bara kunde Webassembly Den lokala C++-gruppen Qt Pepsi NASA söker seriösa retroprogrammerare Voyager 1 V’ger Voyager 2 Peter Esse Teknikveckan Nu kan du köpa rymdgrå möss och tangentbord från Apple Keyboardio - det ergonomiska tangentbordet i trä och med egna switchar Nyheterna från Apples utbildningsevent Swift Merlin Mann Far cry 5 Fullständig avsnittsinformation finns här: https://www.bjoremanmelin.se/podcast/avsnitt-118-tva-och-en-halv-chromebook.html.
Jackie D'Elia has had a long career in web development and programming. For the past several years she has been an independent WordPress developer, primarily on the Genesis platform. During the last year, Jackie has been a regular member of our Saturday podcast panel. We talk to Jackie about her experiences in web development, and what it takes to become a top-quality front-end / WordPress developer. Jackie D'Elia Design https://jackiedelia.com/ Rethink.FM: The forward thinking podcast for WordPress and front end development https://rethink.fm/ ================== Our episode this week is sponsored by LiquidWeb. Liquid Web is offering a 33% discount for your first 6 months of managed WordPress hosting. Head over to https://LiquidWeb.com/wordpress and use the code WPTONIC33 at checkout for your discount. ================== Table of Contents for Episode 177 0:00 Podcast intros. 2:22 Jackie's origin story into web development. 6:40 How is the WordPress community stack up compared to other web communities? 9:00 Jackie discusses her journey through WordPress, and her current setup for developing sites. 13:32 How does Jackie block out time for continuing her web learning? 17:41 What are some of the things Jackie has changed in her processes since starting her podcast, Rethink.fm? 18:59 The desktop mindset, and why agencies don't follow a content-first or mobile-first process. 23:12 Has Jackie encountered any resistance to being a web developer as a woman, or as a person of a particular age? Why these are strengths and not weaknesses. 25:50 Pros and cons between a hosted e-commerce and hosted e-commerce site. Jackie's advice for e-commerce from 10 years of running a business. 30:27 How is Jackie handling the increasing use of JavaScript in WordPress? Her recommendations for integrating JS into a website. 37:09 Jackie's methodology for staying focused. 41:10 The difference between working with a team as opposed to working by yourself. 43:48 What advice does Jackie have for solo consultants trying to make it in freelancing? 45:54 What percentage split does Jackie network among, between prospects and colleagues? 48:48 Podcast outros. =================== Links mentioned during the show: dBase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBase Thesis http://diythemes.com/ Genesis Framework http://my.studiopress.com/themes/genesis/ PostCSS https://github.com/postcss/postcss DesktopServer https://serverpress.com/ Novell NetWare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare Team Treehouse https://teamtreehouse.com/ Lynda from LinkedIn https://www.lynda.com/ Know The Code https://knowthecode.io/ Multiple Intelligences Self-Assessment https://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-assessment
The British Library aims to archive all British online content, celebrating 40 years of mobile telephone technology, Netware box racks up over 16 years of uptime, the rumoured television from Apple, getting set to play the world's largest Pong game.
Episode 0x26 -- The First Rule... Ministry of Information Bulletin: Liquidmatrix is a weekly podcast. While we'd like to be able to say that the Ministry of Information is always correct, that would not necessarily be the case. The past few weeks of Infosec have certainly been interesting. The echo chamber is at an all time echo stratosphere and the daily slog of infosec professionals remains at an all time crappiness. Anyone want to join our "Infosec Anonymous" program? Perhaps we should go with a different name: searching "infosec anonymous" gives me about 210,000 results. Upcoming this week... Lots of News SCADA / Cyber, cyber... etc. finishing it off with DERPs/Mailbag and THE DEEP DIVE Our new weekly Briefs - no arguing or discussion allowed And if you've got commentary, please sent it to mailbag@liquidmatrix.org for us to check out. DISCLAIMER: It's not that explicit, but you may want to use headphones if you're at work. ADDITIONAL DISCLAIMER: In case it is unclear, this is the story of 5 opinionated infosec pros who have sufficient opinions of their own they don't need to speak for anyone except themselves. Ok? Good. In this episode: News and Commentary To hack back or to not hack back The Grugg on Opsec for Hackers (how not get p0wned while p0wning) The dDoS to end all dDosssses that almost broke the ENTIRE internet, then again maybe not, but maybe sorta it did Uptime = 16 years = AWESOME. Feature parity with Netware 16 years later = STILL CAN'T HAVE IT. FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013 SCADA / Cyber, cyber... etc DHS Warns of ‘TDos’ Extortion Attacks on Public Emergency Networks FERC U MAD BRO ???? (PDF) Cyber Divers take Egypt offline (except it might have been a ship's anchor) First time that it looks like actual details were stolen The Reality of Attribution about Cyber Attacks Cyber Security: The Digital Arms Trade Cyber RFI for the Space Race Fukushima Cooling Knocked Offline By... a Rat... that ended badly DERP Security hole allows anyone to reset an Apple ID with email and DOB Mailbag / Bizarro Land My official statement of begging for getting onto the Vegas party list. Thank you for your consideration. Kris Hello! Any chance I can get a couple of tickets to the party? I'm an infosec "professional" from Vancouver BC. I've met some of you guys at various cons, Hope, Defcon, Derbycon. thanks! Kevin The Deep Dive - Security Awareness Training Is Bruce ALWAYS right? Briefly - NO ARGUING OR DISCUSSION ALLOWED Is OwnCloud Good Enough? Monitoring for humans Pimp myself - Top 10 Web Hacks Attempted child abduction thwarted when girl asks stranger for code word Liquidmatrix Staff Projects The Liquidmatrix Vegas Party- We threatened more news. There will be passes distributed. You can beg your way onto the list by sending an email to vegas2013party@liquidmatrix.org. The BSidesLV Ticket Give-away- Three tickets up for grabs: best original piece of artwork incorporating a security rock star; bonus points for using a unicorn best rap song about a major breach best poem describing a vendor DERP Judging will be done by The Liquidmatrix Intern. Mocking will be done by us. I'd suggest you start buying a vote early. Email your submission to bsideslv2013@liquidmatrix.org The Security Conference Library Contribute to the Strategic Defense Execution Standard (#SDES) and you'll be Doing Infosec Right in no time. If you're interested in helping out with openCERT.ca, drop a line to info@openCERT.ca Upcoming Appearances: James speaking at Thotcon, BSidesChicago, BSidesRochester and Training (with Rich Mogull) at BHUSA. Dave will be at Secure Dusseldorf, Infosecurity Europe, Black Hat, DEF CON, Secure Asia In Closing Movie Review: Wargames everyday is CTF! go set up a team Signing up for a SANS course? Be sure to use the code "Liquidmatrix_150" and save $150 off the course fee! And Liquidmatrix_5 for 5% off a course Seacrest Says: "I kinda really wanted to jump in and slam him!" Creative Commons license: BY-NC-SA
Martin Weiss, Glen Davis, and Randal talk with Thomas Müller of Novell partner Bechtle about selling successful upgrades from NetWare to OES Linux. Topics covered: Resources and training that make it easier for Novell partners and customers to transition skills from NetWare to OES Do you need Linux geeks to support OES? What to say […]
Held on: June 2007. Every year Novell run a conference called "Brainshare". It is the premier conference for all things related to Novell. This year two staff members from ITS Technical Services, Mark Goatley and Kris Evans, attended the conference in Salt Lake City. They will be giving an overview of the conference and the new developments with Novell products, including ZENworks, Netware, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop. Ross McKenzie and Mark Grooby from Novell will be giving an overview of recent developments in Novell, and a look forward to the future. They will also discuss the recent deal between Novell and Microsoft. Who: * ITS, Technical Services: Mark Goatley and Kris Evans. * Ross McKenzie and Mark Grooby, Novell. When: Thursday 7 June,1:00pm. Where: Moot Court, 10th Floor, Richardson Building (Note change of venue).
Held on: June 2007. Every year Novell run a conference called "Brainshare". It is the premier conference for all things related to Novell. This year two staff members from ITS Technical Services, Mark Goatley and Kris Evans, attended the conference in Salt Lake City. They will be giving an overview of the conference and the new developments with Novell products, including ZENworks, Netware, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop. Ross McKenzie and Mark Grooby from Novell will be giving an overview of recent developments in Novell, and a look forward to the future. They will also discuss the recent deal between Novell and Microsoft. Who: * ITS, Technical Services: Mark Goatley and Kris Evans. * Ross McKenzie and Mark Grooby, Novell. When: Thursday 7 June,1:00pm. Where: Moot Court, 10th Floor, Richardson Building (Note change of venue).
Held on: June 2007. Every year Novell run a conference called "Brainshare". It is the premier conference for all things related to Novell. This year two staff members from ITS Technical Services, Mark Goatley and Kris Evans, attended the conference in Salt Lake City. They will be giving an overview of the conference and the new developments with Novell products, including ZENworks, Netware, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop. Ross McKenzie and Mark Grooby from Novell will be giving an overview of recent developments in Novell, and a look forward to the future. They will also discuss the recent deal between Novell and Microsoft. Who: * ITS, Technical Services: Mark Goatley and Kris Evans. * Ross McKenzie and Mark Grooby, Novell. When: Thursday 7 June,1:00pm. Where: Moot Court, 10th Floor, Richardson Building (Note change of venue).
Held on: June 2007. Every year Novell run a conference called "Brainshare". It is the premier conference for all things related to Novell. This year two staff members from ITS Technical Services, Mark Goatley and Kris Evans, attended the conference in Salt Lake City. They will be giving an overview of the conference and the new developments with Novell products, including ZENworks, Netware, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop. Ross McKenzie and Mark Grooby from Novell will be giving an overview of recent developments in Novell, and a look forward to the future. They will also discuss the recent deal between Novell and Microsoft. Who: * ITS, Technical Services: Mark Goatley and Kris Evans. * Ross McKenzie and Mark Grooby, Novell. When: Thursday 7 June,1:00pm. Where: Moot Court, 10th Floor, Richardson Building (Note change of venue).
Overview Once again we bring Jason Williams back into the studio, this time to menace him with questions from our listener community. We delve into the differences between SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Open Enterprise Server (OES). We also consider the advantages of using the SLES-based version of OES compared to the NetWare-based version. […]
Tens of thousands of organizations worldwide use either NetWare or Open Enterprise Server. Many of these organizations have told Novell that in order to start using Linux as a desktop OS, they must have a way for desktop Linux systems to simply and easily connect to their Novell infrastructure. Jason Williams tell us how Novell is bringing this to life. (The Developers went AWOL. Actually, AWL.)
Our first listener requests. Martin Buckley, the legendary "Evil ZEN Scientist" tells us about what's new about ZENworks 7 Linux Management. Then, a BrainShare preview with Mike Morgan and Brandon Bailey. Finally, for all of you who said you want some NetWare, Jason Williams and Troy Wilde give us the update onOpen Enterprise Server.