[Mon Oct 29 08:10:31 CDT 2018]

According to an official press release published yesterday, IBM has agreed to acquire Red Hat. Judging from the headline chosen to announce the move, their objective is to "change the cloud landscape" and "become the world's #1 hybrid cloud provider". All I can say is that I'm glad I decided to switch to Debian about 12 years ago. At the time, Red Hat had decided to end their home desktop offering (which, at the time, I even purchased on a regular basis in order to contribute to the vendor, even though it was perfectly legal to run it for free), which generated a lot of chaos among its user base. I started searching for alternatives, and ended up settling on Ubuntu. However, after running Ubuntu for a couple of years, I realized that, first of all, it didn't provide enough stability (not in the sense that the OS would crash all the time, but rather in the sense that it was changing quite a bit, sometimes even having an impact on some of its central components, every 6 months), and, second, since it was a for profit business, it was subject to the same type of constraints as Red Hat, which means that there was no guarantee whatsoever that I could continue running the product in the long-term. So, I switched to Debian, and have been quite happy with that decision during all this time.

Now, in principle, I assume most people will see the news of IBM buying Red Hat as good news for Red Hat, Linux, and consumers in general. I beg to differ. Sure, most Red Hat products are licensed under the GPL, and that's cool. However, notice that not so long ago they bought CentOS, which provided a free (as in beer) alternative to RHEL, thus purchasing the main free distro based on their own software. But, worse yet, the IBM purchase eliminates any guarantee that their developers will be neutral when dealing with bugs and issues reported by other hardware vendors that will be competing directly against IBM. This concentration of the technology industry does not only reduce the amount of competition in the market, but it also brings up questions about fair practices. It looks as if we are back to the times of the robber barons. {link to this entry}

[Sun Oct 28 10:30:16 CDT 2018]

For quite sometime now, I have been trying to use the CLI-based bc tool to calculate percentages. Since it truly is a calculator language, I knew it would be able to do it. On the other hand, precisely because it's not a simple tool, using it like I'd use a calculator wouldn't work. For example:

$ bc -q
(1500/3000)*100
0

$ bc -q
1500/3000*100
0

That's obviously wrong and, no matter how many different combinations I tried, I never got the correct result. So, finally, a couple of days ago I decided to do a quick search, and came across this forum exchange that helped me figure it out. The key is to set the scale, for some reason that I cannot fathom (after all, according to the man page, the scale parameter only sets "the total number of decimal digits after the decimal point"):

$ bc -q
scale=2
1500/3000*100
50.00

Finally, following the directions from this other page you can easily add the "scale=2" to your default preferences. {link to this entry}