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IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

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Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#311

Post by bayindirh »

ghaff wrote: post #308
bayindirh wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alma is not a clone of CentOS Stream. I'll kindly disagree on this with you. Reading the blog post titled "The Future of AlmaLinux is Bright", located at [0]: > After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be binary compatible with RHEL. > The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer b…

Red Hat bringing CentOS in-house (well before IBM entered the picture) was IMO one of the first in a string of expedient decisions that were... unfortunate. When I was at Red Hat I loudly argued against some of the ways things were handled but I also understand why various actions were taken when they were. I'd also argue that CentOS classic was mostly bug for bug compatible but probably close enough for most. It sha…

That closeness allowed CentOS to be a drop-in replacement for RHEL for thousands of installations and exotic hardware combinations. Unfortunately, we don't have this capability anymore. Rocky bears most of that load now.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#312

Post by skydhash »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #257
jl6 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just accountants. I remember watching fully “non-technical” insurance admin / customer service people play the green screen keyboard like they were concert pianists. People can cope with a lot when they have to.

There is a learning curve, but not coping. One of the crest things with terminal: with experience one can type ahead, even before the form fully opened one can type data, which is queued in the input buffer and work efficiently. In a modern GUI application a lot of time is wasted with reaching for the mouse, aiming and waiting for the new form to render. That requires coping with it

I had to interact with a windows software which allows you to collect data with a digital form. We used it to digitize paper based survey by mapping free form question to a choices list.

The best oart was that it was entirely keyboard driven. If you can touch type, you can just read the paper and type away. The job was mind numbing, but the software itself was great.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#313

Post by jmclnx »

bobloblaw22 wrote: post #206
throwaway2037 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was HashiCorp ever profitable since its IPO? From here, it says no: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/hcp/financials/ If never profitable (or terrible return on equity), why would you call the layoffs "arbitrary"? It seems pretty reasonable to me.

Why hire people in the first place if you aren't profitable? Seems pretty irresponsible to me. Or have the rules changed?

Yes the rules have changed, seems the idea is to get big fast increasing revenue without regard to profits, and eventually have a great IPO, then one of the following:

1. hope you can sucker someone into buying the company

2. keep the VC $ flowing and continue growing, then loop to # 1

3. worse case, need to start making a profit and hope you can survive until # 1. If #1 does not happen, pray(?).

During this time, the founders are pulling in a great salary.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#314

Post by thanatos519 »

cyberpunk wrote: post #268
slillibri wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HCL isn’t a programming language. This seems to be the main misconception about it and Terraform.

It’s so infuriatingly close though which is what makes it so fucking annoying to work with. It has loops, conditionals, variables…

Indeed, it's the worst case of uncanny valley syndrome!

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#315

Post by ghaff »

richardfontana wrote: post #305
dralley wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Cormier was a very different type of CEO than Jim Whitehurst for sure. But that's not an IBM thing, he was with Red Hat for 20 years previously. I agree with you FWIW. The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes. And COVID happened shortly after so that also throws a wrench into the comparisons. The point is, it's hard to point to any…

>The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes. Longtime Red Hatter here. Most of any challenges I see at Red Hat around culture I attribute to this rapid growth. In some ways it's surprising how well so many relatively new hires seem to internalize the company's traditional values.

Yeah, when I left I think there were something like 7x the number of people than when I joined. You can't run those two companies the same way no matter who is in charge.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#316

Post by pc86 »

zifpanachr23 wrote: post #201
nayuki wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it During my time at IBM and at other companies a decade ago, I can name examples of this: * Lotus Notes instead of Microsoft Office. * Lotus Sametime Connect instead of... well Microsoft's instant messengers suck (MSN, Lync, Skype, Teams)... maybe Slack is one of the few tolerable ones? * Rational Team Concert inst…

The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. I've seen a lot of failed projects for data entry apps because the experienced workers tend to prefer the terminals over the web apps. Usually the requirement for the new frontend is driven by management rather than the workers. Which is understandable to me as a programmer. If it's a task that I'm…

This only matters if "quick and more responsive" is the only thing that matters. Yes of course you can enter payroll timesheets on a TUI if you spend days/weeks/months gaining that muscle memory. The same way you can edit in vim much faster than vscode or Eclipse if you spend weeks/months/years gaining that muscle memory.

The fact that someone who has been doing it for years can do it faster is obvious, and pretty irrelevant.

Take someone who has never used either, and they'll enter data on the web app much faster.

You don't see keyboard nav in most web apps for similar reasons. First-time users won't know about it, there's no standard beyond what's built-in the browser (tab to next input, that kind of thing), and 90% of your users will never sit through a tutorial or onboarding flow, or read the documentation.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#317

Post by bayindirh »

jonathanspw wrote: post #310
bayindirh wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll say it depends. Sometimes the hardware or the software you run requires exact versions of the packages with some specific behavior to work correctly. These include drivers' parts on both kernel and userland, some specific application which requires a very specific version of a library, so on and so forth. I for one, can use Alma for 99% of the time instead of the old CentOS, but it's not always possible, if you'…

We don't change the expected versions. We might patch/backport more to them if there are issues, but the versions remain. Basically the goal is still to fit the exact situation you just brought up. I'm not aware of this ever not being the case if it weren't to be the case for some reason, then we have a problem we need to fix. All of the extra stuff we do, patch, etc. is with exactly what you just stated in mind.

I'll be installing a set of small servers in the near future. I'll be retrying Alma in a couple of them, to give it another chance.

As I said, in some cases Rocky is a better CentOS replacement than Alma is.

But to be crystal clear, I do not discount Alma as a distribution or belittle the effort behind it. Derivative, clone or from scratch, keeping a distro alive is a tremendous amount of work. I did it, and know it.

It's just me selecting the tools depending on a suitability score, and pragmatism. Not beef, not fanaticism, nothing in that vein.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#318

Post by johannes1234321 »

viraptor wrote: post #286
avhception wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case in point: the aforementioned accountant obviously hated the new GUI-based app, exactly because of what you said. Aiming the mouse, looking for that button, etc. slows you down.

It doesn't have to. The tab order seems shortcuts are there and very usable... if anyone bothers to implement them.

Not only implement, but implement them consistently and making users aware.

Consistency is a thing. Old windows apps often followed a style guide to some degree, that was lost with web (while it's also hard, as styleguides differ between systems, like Windows and Mac) and wasn't ever as close as Mainframe terminal things where function keys had global effects.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#319

Post by pc86 »

jsk2600 wrote: post #299
lenkite wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things have changed back though - the CLI is hot again at-least amongst developers.

I find it ironic that we developers prefer to use CLI because it's quick, efficient, stable, etc., but what we then deliver to people as web apps is quite the opposite experience.

It's what the default is. TUIs default to fast, stable, high-information-density, so you have to real work to make them otherwise. And I say this next part as primarily a front-end developer the past few years: web apps default to slow, brittle, too-much-whitespace "make the logo bigger" cruft, and it takes real work to make them otherwise.

At the end of the day most people are lazy and most things, including (especially?) things done for work, are low quality. So you end up with the default more often than not.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#320

Post by pc86 »

gertrunde wrote: post #274
avhception wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second the TUI argument here. Back in ... maybe 2005 or what, in our ~60 people family business, I had the pleasure to watch an accountant use our bespoke payroll system. That was a DOS-based app, running on an old Pentium 1 system. She was absolutely flying through the TUI. F2, type some numbers, Enter, F5 and so on and so on, at an absolutely blistering speed. Data entry took single-digit seconds. When that was c…

An application I used to deal with was similar, but with a somewhat quirky developer, who would deliberately flip between positive/negative confirmation questions, e.g.: - Confirm this is correct? (Yes=F1, No=F2) - Would you like to make any changes? (Yes=F1, No=F2) And maybe sometimes flip the yes/no F-key assignments as well. In theory this was done to force users to read the question and pay attention to what they…

Ah just randomly pick between F1 and F9 for the two questions and don't necessarily put them in order. Yes=F7, No=F3

/s

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