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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

#181

Post by pjmlp »

jjeaff wrote: post #134
josh_fyi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have some employees in India and apparently, Adobe does this there. They will just randomly show up and ask to look at all your systems and see if you are using pirated Adobe products. I have no idea what the laws are there, but the companies they show up at don't even necessarily have any license with Adobe. I can't imagine that is legal in India, but apparently it happens unabetted.

It is legal in many countries, because usually there is a police department that validates business activities are following the law as they should, and they tend to come along with a couple of officers.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#182

Post by the_why_of_y »

techntoke wrote: post #153
McAtNite wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Considering that after RHEL took over CentOS, they are again significantly behind RHEL, and RHEL isn't cost-effective... he could find equal support and probably much more from the Ubuntu community. CentOS or RHEL doesn't even have a public package search, and for good reason. When you find out that they are using an outdated kernel, and outdated qemu/libvirt components, you'll quickly find yourself installing RPMs f…

Looking at the "Delay" column in the release tables in Wikipedia, it appears that it's CentOS7 releases that have longer delays, the CentOS6 delays haven't changed in recent years (and there's nothing like the huge delays in 2011). Possibly because there are more packages being updated in 7?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS

Package search is on https://git.centos.org/

For example, libvirt is at version 4.5 in CentOS 7.6, while CentOS 7.0 shipped with version 1.1: https://git.centos.org/rpms/libvirt/commits/c7

Whereas in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it's at version 4.0: https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=libvirt&searchon...

The RHEL kernel's version number is doesn't signify as much as you'd think, there are whole subsystems backported into it from later upstream kernel releases.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#183

Post by dankohn1 »

pojzon wrote: post #173
streetcat1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Becuase of kubernetes. The platform of platforms. Kubernetes is the andriod to amazon iphone (in analogy). It is the only way to get out of cloud vendor lock in. IBM is mainly a consultancy business, so they basically back integrated with the cloud os - kubernetes, or more specifically in this case - open shift. The only issue here is that are around 23 or more certified kubernetes distors, so this might have been an…

To use for example EKS (Amazon Kubernetes) you still have to provide worker nodes by using EC2 API.. which more or less means your infrastructure management is in the same lock-in as you were previously while simply deploying with EC2 VMs.. Kubernetes doesnt solve the vendor lock in issue completely. You still need workers, external dns, databases, gateways and other to operate. The strength of Kubernetes comes in de…

Take a look at SIG Cluster API for Kubernetes-native ways to spin up and down new nodes. https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api

Also see https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/external-dns.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#184

Post by acdha »

broknbottle wrote: post #112
acdha wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lying like that is a great way to have to deal with lawsuits from every investor who isn’t convinced that the deal is a good idea.

It's not a lie if you believe it ;)

It is, however, if there’s documentation showing something else which comes up in discovery. Seriously, never try this.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#186

Post by jnordwick »

mruts wrote: post #147
jnordwick wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

The price of gold up until the 1920s was pretty stable sub-$19 - even below the government's fixed rate. As far as I understood, the gold rush had very little impact on the price of gold.

But I also think this confuses topics. You are just talking straight up arbitrage that has nothing to do with being a bank. That arbitrage from high supply area to low suppy area will lower the price. The arbitrager makes some money on the transactions, but the net effect is to push the price down. Not that great for the huge socks on loans already on the banks balance sheets.

While the way the Fed operates, currency enters our economy through bank deposits turned into loans (not as true as it once was in the post QE world) those loans are going to be repaid 5+ years when inflationary effects have already started pushing the dollars down that they are being paid back in. Plus, the point of the extra reserves is to drive down rates since there will be a greater supply. They get hosed in both ways.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#187

Post by dodobirdlord »

ethbro wrote: post #179
dodobirdlord wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give their compute assets are essentially surpluses from running their other businesses (advertising, software sales, and online retail). This is mythology. It is mostly not actually true.

Source? Do any of the major clouds publish their base, first-party load?

Consider the ever-expanding region lists of cloud providers, and it becomes clear that the vast majority of cloud infrastructure was purpose-built to support their cloud offerings.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#188

Post by mruts »

jnordwick wrote: post #186
mruts wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

The price of gold up until the 1920s was pretty stable sub-$19 - even below the government's fixed rate. As far as I understood, the gold rush had very little impact on the price of gold. But I also think this confuses topics. You are just talking straight up arbitrage that has nothing to do with being a bank. That arbitrage from high supply area to low suppy area will lower the price. The arbitrager makes some money…

In our fractional reserve system, money is made through loans themselves, not deposits.

Moreover, being a bank is about arbitrage. Traditionally, banks arbitrage between short term loans (the federal funds rate and the overnight rates) and long term debt. i.e Banks borrow short-term and lend long-term. The way they make money is taking on risk: converting a lot of risk (long-term loans) into short-term risk (the banks borrowing at the overnight rate). This is where quants and models come in. It takes a lot of skill to turn that long-term risk into short-term risk.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#189

Post by ethbro »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #187
ethbro wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? Do any of the major clouds publish their base, first-party load?

Consider the ever-expanding region lists of cloud providers, and it becomes clear that the vast majority of cloud infrastructure was purpose-built to support their cloud offerings.

Yet at the same time, expanding their own use.

I doubt very much the first deployment of Gmail looked anything like its footprint today.

More regions doesn't necessarily stem solely from customer demand.

I expect the vast majority does, but without numbers, that's just a guess.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#190

Post by Nursie »

edoceo wrote: post #120
Nursie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little over-cynical, IMHO. They don't have licensing in the products because it's an overhead, it complicates development, and their enterprise customers are supposed to be trustworthy and in communication with IBM about ongoing requirements. But yes, they have auditors to enforce this stuff.

Too expensive "overhead" for IBM to develop? So rather, they employ 1000s of humans for the work? The math don't check out for me

I didn't say too expensive, I said it's an overhead, which it is. They have hundreds of thousands of people working for them, a few auditors is a drop in the ocean compared to making every software engineer cater for licensing.
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