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IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

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Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#141

Post by seabrookmx »

Spivak wrote: post #72
streetcat1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all of those are quite exotic, and thus risky / expensive to support.

None of those are exotic if you're running on-prem/colo'd workloads. They might be exotic to app develoers but for anyone in operations they're your staple tools. They're the tools used by the people backing your Kube cluster :P IPA/IdM is the gold standard for user management on a fleet of servers. Gluster is the best replicated filesystem hands down and Ceph is the only alternative to expensive SANs that scales wel…

Don't forget Red Hat bought CoreOS, which was a huge k8s contributor (and the original authors of etcd).

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#142

Post by dahfizz »

josh_fyi wrote: post #76
riffraff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my ignorance,but what is an IBM auditor?

IBM products have no license-checking built in, on purpose. They want you to make more copies than your negotiated license agreement allows. Then, when the auditor comes in, they charge you the sky-high list price, backdating it as well.

This is not my experience. I didn't have to set up the satellite server, so maybe that's a pain, but it only has to happen once. Then it's one command on each client to register it with the satellite.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#143

Post by BaronSamedi »

streetcat1 wrote: post #54
mike_hearn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes has nothing to do with cloud vendor lockin. I don't know where you're getting this from. Any hosting provider can spin you up some managed Linux nodes on a bunch of distros and they can be admined by the same tools and same people. That's why all the big clouds spend so much effort creating new services with custom APIs that aren't just "run a process in a chroot jail with fiddly bits". Big Data, AI and so…

I getting it from Jo Beda, the CTO of heptio (now VMWARE). More specifically , from his definition of cloud native. A cloud native system is a system that manage its resources via an API. The vendor locking in this case is the cloud API. I.e. if I want a resource (e.g. a VM) , I need to use the EC2 api. With kubernetes, I write to the kuberentes API which is open source, cloud vendor natural. However, and this the ke…

That seems to be trading one type of lock-in for another. The problem with that approach is that now you have added a highly complex layer into your architecture that you need to maintain, integrate, and secure. I think it more likely that in AI, Amazon and Microsoft will continue to add more powerful cloud services making home-grown kubernetes solutions even less relevant.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#144

Post by gridlockd »

jnordwick wrote: post #124
gridlockd wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The overnight rate does not effect real long term rates, they are fucking inverted. The federal funds rate greatly affects credit rates, that's why it's a primary instrument in financial policy. > Pensions and retirement funds are only affected by the overnight rates in so much they use hold short term reserves as cash equivalents. That's the direct effect, but because all other credit rates are affected, so are co…

Gold only broke out two months ago. For the most part it has been around 120 for over five years. And this is probably a consequence of all the trade issues as we get ready for less trade from tariffs. But the fed doesn't control long term rates (probably wish it did). The short end is heavily driven by technical factors including the overnight rate (even then that is only a target and it doesn't anyways follow what…

> Gold only broke out two months ago.

The Fed only signaled a return to rate cuts two months ago.

> But the fed doesn't control long term rates (probably wish it did).

I never said they "control" long-term rates, but they greatly influence them, especially in terms of how low they can go.

> The long end isn't the same. It is driven by return on capital (higher returns both seek out loans and can afford to pay more for them).

Like this?

https://m.privatewealth.usbank.com/pcrcp/images/articles/201...

> If there was long term mispricing we would see it in the tips market, and we don't.

I don't see that. It takes quite a while for overvalued asset prices to make a dent in the CPI, by that time it's more likely that the bubble has popped.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#145

Post by snuxoll »

mbreese wrote: post #109
snuxoll wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moreover, I would love a cloud based on second hand hardware (which should be much cheaper than 30%) I’ve wanted to do this for some time, but there’s a lot of cost involved in the space (square footage itself, electricity, cooling) that you can’t cut just by running older stuff. Bandwidth and storage cost the same regardless as well (don’t buy used disks for anything remotely important).

An even bigger cost is power (if we’re talking about a lot of compute capacity- eg a private cloud). A cluster that’s running older servers might be 30% cheaper to purchase, but it will likely be more power inefficient, which would make it significantly more expensive to actually operate. Depending on your workload, it is often the case that purchasing new (more efficient) hardware can actually be the cheaper option…

This part can vary a lot these days at least, the Ivy/Sandy Bridge xeon chips are still remarkably capable and I can buy a used 11th gen Dell server for a couple hundred dollars.

Before the Westmere/Nehalam chips it was a different story, but anything newer is going to sip power and perform well as long as you know you’re not getting “all the perf out of it”.

It’s entirely possible to make a business out of this, but you rely on a customer base that’s inherently cheap and fussy by nature. Not all of them are, but most looking “for a deal” are cheapskates who will milk you dry in time/labor if you let them and you don’t have the margins to deal with that bullshit.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#146

Post by McAtNite »

techntoke wrote: post #137
indopedia wrote: post #2

Learning RHEL now :)

You're much better off learning core Linux utilities like from installing Arch, rather than outdated distro specific management.

Assuming he’s coming from a Windows background learning core Linux utilities on Redhat is also possible. At least going through rhel he can reference the Redhat documentation which tend to be far better written than the million free guides out there.

As a real life example, the other day I needed to migrate /var on a Linux box. The freely available CentOs guides covered it well, but when I was done the applications were having a lot of issues. Going through Redhat’s documentation it quickly became obvious that the other articles neglected to mention rebuilding the grub boot files and getting SELinux running on the new directory.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#147

Post by mruts »

jnordwick wrote: post #30
mruts wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely spot on. Banks love inflation because it allows them to arbitrage between the CPI and the rest of the economy. Also the higher inflation, the more valuable a bank's services become.

What? Inflation means debtors make out comparative to creditors since they get to pay debt back in less expensive dollars. Banks are usually the creditor.

Well consider the clipper ship example. There was huge inflation in gold prices during the gold rush on the West coast. When the gold reached the East coast financial markets, the price of gold goes up there as well. So the key to making money was latency arbitrage between the East and West coast with fast ships. This allowed the owners to capture the delay between gold prices.

Banks do the same thing. Inflation is like a cone of molasses that is being pored on the banks. It then slowly expands. So banks get the cheap money first and lend it to people that haven’t been hit with inflation yet.

If they do this fast enough, they make money off arbitraging the inflation rates. Of course, the CPI doesn’t capture any of this.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#148

Post by kgwgk »

criddell wrote: post #119
mrep wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, remember, share buybacks are just a more tax efficient form of returning profits to investors than dividends. As they buy more and more of their stock, the remaining shareholders end up owning a larger and larger percentage share of the company. Taken to the extreme, there would finally be 1 share left held by someone and thus that person would own 100% of the company and be entitled to 100% of the profits from…

> The company cannot cannot just buy the last stock because the stock itself is worth all the cash the company holds and the future profits it will make. The last share is worth whatever the person that holds it is willing to sell it for, right? A share of IBM is worth $136 right now because there are two parties willing to buy/sell a share of IBM at that price. I realize this would never happen in a million years, b…

I think an easier path to have corporations which are not owned by anyone is to look at cross-holdings. Maybe one could theoretically get to a situation where a group of companies hold shares of each other and completely own themselves in the aggregate? Even if that may not be completely legal one can imagine that given the complexity of the situation one could accidentally end in a forbidden state.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#149

Post by mruts »

downrightmike wrote: post #125
H8crilA wrote: post #98

PSA: If you want exposure in your portfolio to the M&A market there's an ETF that does it: https://www.etf.com/MNA It's perhaps the single biggest "alternative" strategy ETF.

YTD isn't even 1%, almost anything else has done better.

I mean SPY has returned like 3% YTD. But that’s not really the point. M&A has zero to very low Beta exposure, so it’s almost completely uncorrelated to the market. This, in general, is a good thing.

A lot of quant market neutral hedge funds only return 3-5% per year. Compared to the S&P, this looks pretty bad. But the goal of these funds isn’t to provide the best returns, it is to provide the best risk adjusted returns. You may ask, why would I care about that?

The answer is that you can synthetically match any return by either buying or selling (borrowing) at the risk free rate. So if I had a fund that had returns of 4% and volatility of 2%, I could turn it into 2 and 1, 8 and 2, or 16 and 4, or whatever.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#150

Post by NullPrefix »

davidmr wrote: post #129
philjohn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with these audits is that the exact licensing conditions can be vague, or the audit points to something that is in compliance, but might not be (e.g. you're licensed for 8 cores, but your replacement servers have 12 cores, you still only need the 8 cores so you disable 4 cores in the bios ... well, they will say, for all we know you only disabled those cores when we came to do the audit ... so now you owe…

The IBM licenses are so obtuse that it can only be intentional. This may be outdated, but they used to use these stupid “processor units” that had some loose correlation to CPU performance. If a perfectly well-intentioned systems person moved licensed software to some new server that had half the cores, but was on a newer generation CPU, and didn’t think to ask the lawyers about it, you could get tagged for huge buck…

> “processor units”

Graphical processor(ing?) unit. How many (cuda) cores are we talking about? /s

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