@jzb@mastodon.social
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

jzb

@jzb@mastodon.social

Longtime open source user, advocate, and contributor. I’ve been working with and writing about Linux and open source since 1999. Currently working for LWN.net.

Have worked at Red Hat, Intel, Citrix, Novell/SUSE, and others.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

itsfoss, (edited ) to linux
@itsfoss@mastodon.social avatar

When you find that perfect match! 🐧

#linux

jzb,
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

@itsfoss Um.... have y'all watched the show? :thaenkin:

jzb, to linux
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

Charlie Stross has a quality rant about Microsoft Recall today. I briefly considered whether we could get a Quote of the Week out of this for LWN, but I suspect it would cause the comment section to completely melt down...

He says, "Some commentators are snarking that Microsoft really really wants to make 2025 the year of Linux on the Desktop, and it's kind of hard to refute them right now."

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/06/is-microsoft-trying-to-commit-.html

sjvn, to random
@sjvn@mastodon.social avatar

I've had my fair share of gear like this.

jzb,
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

@sjvn It me.

sjvn, to random
@sjvn@mastodon.social avatar

I've been waiting to re-use this cartoon for years.

jzb,
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

@sjvn SAME

jzb, to animals
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

Two members of my editorial staff. Everything I write is purr reviewed. #CatsOfMastodon

jzb, to random
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

Someday I will stop typing :wq in other text editors / programs to save and quit my work.

Someday. That day, apparently, is not today.

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Oh my, I just started re-reading ‘Microserfs’, the 1995 novel about a fictionalized Microsoft by Douglas Coupland. When I first read it, I was a couple of years younger than the narrator, Dan. Now I’m around the same age as his “fiftysomething” father who gets laid off by IBM early in the book. How time flies…also, the book reminds one of how confused you are in your 20s (well, I certainly was). That’s one thing that improves with age, at least :)

jzb,
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

@ricmac Love that book. First read it somewhere around 1999 and re-read it every few years.

If you can, pick up the (sadly, abridged) audiobook read by Matthew Perry. AFAIK he only narrated a few books, but IMO he really brings the book to life - has exactly the right voice and delivery for the material.

jzb, to random
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

Seeing a lot of chatter about attitudes towards newcomers for people getting started with Linux.

I had no idea what I was doing in 1996 when I started with Slackware. Nor did I know anyone using Linux at all.

Got it installed, but couldn't get XFree86 going. Sent an email to support@ from the back of the CD case. Patrick Volkerding himself responded & kindly walked me through what I needed to do.

Probably would've dropped the idea of using Linux if I'd been met with hostility instead.

textfiles, to random
@textfiles@digipres.club avatar

A passionate review is still a review

jzb,
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

@textfiles but… what’s the album?!

jzb, to random
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

Just curious - of folks who follow me here on Mastodon, what is your desktop of choice? KDE Plasma, GNOME, Mate, Cinnamon, Cosmic, Xfce, other?

(Tried a poll, but apparently Mastodon only allows 4 options? That's woefully insufficient.)

Adorable_Sergal, to linux
@Adorable_Sergal@hachyderm.io avatar

So what is the best Linux distro for a cat with only one brain cell?

https://hachyderm.io/

#Linux

jzb,
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

@Adorable_Sergal Sir Wobbles prefers Fedora.

jzb, to opensource
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

I do believe that Willow is happy that I’m back from Open Source Summit. #opensource #catsofmastodon #tortie

Willow, a tortoiseshell cat, napping happily.

jwildeboer, to random
@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net avatar

Non-profits backed by billionaires or big companies will not solve problems but generate revenue for the few at the expense of the many. Billionaires or big companies will never invest in coops. But that’s the better way. Small is beautiful. #SaturdayTipsyWiadom

jzb,
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

@jwildeboer You had a chance to make a really privileged audience uncomfortable and passed it up? 😀

vwbusguy, (edited ) to random
@vwbusguy@mastodon.online avatar

Kids these days will never appreciate how much TLS is built into everything. Back in my day, we had to setup stunnel connections for encrypting database and vendor API connections if we wanted them to be encrypted.

jzb,
@jzb@mastodon.social avatar

@vwbusguy you remember Stronghold Enterprise Web Server?

jwildeboer, (edited ) to random
@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net avatar

deleted_by_author

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    jzb,
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    @jwildeboer @raffaele libraries really do have everything…

    jzb, to random
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    Bit of a rough weekend. Our most senior lab (nearly 14!) had been having some behavior changes (extra barky, losing weight) and last exam showed cancer.

    A few days ago she started showing more signs of distress and discomfort (whining, heavy breathing, what seems to be disorientation). I had hoped she'd rally, have a few more good weeks or months, but it doesn't seem to be going that way.

    We decided we should say goodbye tomorrow, after the oldest can come home from college to her. It sucks.

    jwildeboer, (edited ) to random
    @jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net avatar

    Again the FOSS world has proven to be vigilant and proactive in finding bugs and backdoors, IMHO. The level of transparency is stellar, especially compared to proprietary software companies. What the FOSS world has accomplished in 24 hours after detection of the backdoor code in #xz deserves a moment of humbleness. Instead we have flamewars and armchair experts shouting that we must change everything NOW. Which would introduce even more risks. Progress is made iteratively. Learn, adapt, repeat.

    jzb,
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    @jwildeboer yes… but. I’m now wondering if there are other instances we haven’t caught, or caught yet. Seems optimistic to assume that we’ve spotted a solitary instance of a very sophisticated approach to sneaking in back doors.

    At a minimum, it might be time to revisit the practice of key signing parties and doing more to vet contributors.

    xahteiwi, (edited ) to random
    @xahteiwi@mastodon.social avatar

    Let's be real, being present at a tech conference, as a company, is — among other things — a marketing effort.

    Now, in your opinion, what's the best way for a company to support its own cause (build reputation, attract potential customers, attract potential employees) at a tech conference, if you had to pick just one?

    Boosts OK.

    jzb,
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    @xahteiwi Obviously this is only my experience, but I've never met anyone who was swayed by the size of a company's sponsorship or booth size in a good way. I guess having a dinky booth can work against big vendors by seeming too cheap, but I've never known swag or booth size to correlate with any success metric.

    That said, handing out swag + material goes alongside conversations which is important. Talks alone don't supplant that.

    And, depending on event, no sponsorship may mean no talk.

    jzb, to random
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    Any Flathub admins around on Mastodon? I've emailed a question about verification a day ago and haven't received any response yet.

    #Flathub #Flatpak

    popey, to random
    @popey@mastodon.social avatar

    What's the protocol when someone emails you asking you to "give up" the domain you've owned for 25 years because "You're only using it for a blog", and they want to use it for a community they want to build, and they don't want to have "JoinFoo" dot com.

    Do nothing? Explain that other TLDs are available? Tell them to "Jog on?"

    jzb,
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    @popey Quote them a really, mind-bogglingly high price.

    sjvn, to random
    @sjvn@mastodon.social avatar

    And now you know why NVIDIA now has a market cap of over two trillion bucks.

    jzb,
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    @sjvn something something gold rush, something something picks and shovels. NVIDIA is damned lucky that all the recent get rick quick fads happen to be GPU-intensive.

    jwildeboer, to generativeAI
    @jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net avatar

    I admit, I am a bit amused. I installed a generative AI model locally on my laptop (Realistic Vision v3.0 8-bit), gave it the following prompt: "Freedom for computers! Unite all the nerds! Solidarity with Free Software! Freedom for printers! Socialist style poster from the 1960s." and it returned this :)

    #GenerativeAI #Poster

    jzb,
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    @jwildeboer The middle one looks like he's half Woody Allen, half RMS.

    Somebody needs to come up with a project called The Dometer now.

    baldur, to random
    @baldur@toot.cafe avatar

    Has anybody written about what happened that led to the dissolution of the Open Collective Foundation and why it seemed to have such a short notice?

    jzb,
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    @baldur I wrote about it for LWN, more from the angle of disambiguating all the things called "Open Collective" or a variant thereof. https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/964402/0edf4547a733a349/

    Not a lot of satisfying answers, I'm afraid.

    jzb,
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    @baldur Indeed. I've been saying for many years now: A company, its products, and its open source projects should all have different names to avoid confusion and other problems.

    If your company is Acme Corp, it's really confusing if you have a product also named Acme and an open source project called Acme. If you untangle those when people start saying "this is confusing" it's too late. (Or just in time if the point is to conflate the bunch of them....)

    The OC situation is very confusing.

    ben, to random
    @ben@werd.social avatar

    I've created a situation for myself where every blog post on my site is connected to my newsletter, so everything I write ends up getting emailed out instantly.

    But not every post warrants that. So should I create a new "short article" content type?

    Maybe, right?

    And then those wouldn't all be emailed out in real time - instead they'd be collected up as a digest or maybe not emailed at all?

    jzb,
    @jzb@mastodon.social avatar

    @ben is this wordpress? I’ve wondered about their “newsletter” implementation, but haven’t set it up myself.

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