Posts by jlturriff

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Somewhere I seem to remember seeing support for users with impairments (visual, audio, tactile,...) being advocated, perhaps by XDG standards? but this Gnome developer, Jordan Petridis, seems not to have heard of that? or just doesn't care?

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

"– not very well" has to be the kindest description anyone has ever made about Musk's behavour.

Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks

To reduce the chance that when the user just picks the first browser on the list, the list should be randomized, using part of the system clock and perhaps something like the MAC address. This would spread the selections better than a static list.

Why Chromebooks are the new immortals of tech

Re: Data

Why sell it to anyone who waves money in their face, of course; and who knows where it will end up?

NASA wants to believe ... that you can help it crack UFO mysteries

NASA can avoid defunding the New Horizons support project by diverting the money they're wasting on UFO research to something more productive.

https://www.space.com/nasa-new-horizons-budget-uncertainty

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

IIRC, Microsoft was also the miscreant who provided embedded HTML in email as a feature, which proved to be an excellent tool for tracking and data mining of its users.

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

All I have to say is, "a plague upon software developers who force sans-serif fonts on their users."

OpenAI is still banging on about defeating rogue superhuman intelligence

Not to worry!

The folks at the AI for Good conference in Geneva have solved these issues, according to Reuters news service:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/robots-say-they-wont-steal-jobs-rebel-against-humans-2023-07-07/

Good to know that we're all safe from rogue AIs, eh?

HCL proves Lotus Notes will never die by showing off beta of lucky Domino 14.0

Address length and field sizes

Client apps will be 64-bit and no 32-bit clients will ship. That decision means field sizes can be larger in clients, meaning more data can be entered.

Ah. I always wondered why my field sizes are so limited...

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

"Just run the test scripts." ―easy to say, but

On a large system like Azure, it's almost impossible to cover all of the possible combinations of interactions and customer practices. Does a customer run multiple servers that talk to one another? How many different ways are there to back up your databases? Do the servers interact with non-Azure servers? etc.

One would think that MS' test suite would include a realistic working set of databases (perhaps a clone of a production set, including some archival backups) that can be loaded from a known state, but it sounds like they don't.

Criminals spent 10 days in US dental insurer's systems extracting data of 9 million

Oh, yes; that message posted on their website will be a lot of help to low-income victims who don't have internet access...

Laid-off 60-year-old Kyndryl exec says he was told IT giant wanted 'new blood'

Heh. If their employees' average age is 35, maybe they're climbing on the bandwagon of other US businesses that are recruiting child labour. :-)

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

Not only legacy hardware, but software also.

You mention old hardware that won't run more modern Windows than XP, but there are also instances of software that won't run on more modern Windows. The ones I've heard of are industrial control applications that are effectively 'abandonware,' but still necessary to operate industrial equipment (boilers, plywood manufacturing, etc.).

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

But why?

But what does Google say is the compelling reason for making these available?

Why Microsoft just patched a patch that squashed an under-attack Outlook bug

Query for Microsoft

Dost thou even test thine patches?

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Throughput claims

One of the things that really gripes me about telecom (from POTS to Broadband) is the propensity of providers to tout their service speeds as "up to [insert rate here]," as if this means anything. Sure, ISDN was rated at "up to 128K/sec," but just think: 20 bits/sec qualifies as conforming to that boast, too. For example, my satellite link is rated at "up to" 50MB/sec, but right now my throughput is 15.03up/1.46down MB/sec, far lower than my ISP's suggestion.

We need to change the rules so that providers also have to state a LOWER limit.

Rust Foundation so sorry for scaring the C out of you with trademark crackdown talk

Maybe the name should be changed to "Corrosion"?

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

Back to basics

I have to wonder why the simplest fix (renaming or deleting the video viewing software) wasn't the first fix for this; would have saved a lot of troubleshooting...

Uisge.

Maybe he couldn't share it as tracelessly from his own machine?

We read OpenAI's risk study. GPT-4 is not toxic ... if you add enough bleach

More warnings

I notice that your list of warnings does not include misuse by lobbyists of government entities and politicians, foreign governments, and organized crime, which (at least in the US) seem all-too-likely to occur, since the majority of politicians here are in the pockets of big business and other well-financed organizations whose only interest is to further expand their coffers and power.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Indeed, this is why KDE3 and Trinity DE persist although the KDE developers did their best to destroy KDE with KDE4 (going as far as deleting nearly all of the documentation (such as it was).

The quest to make Linux bulletproof

Re: It's all about making it easier...

"Seems distributions that once championed "User Choice" in Linux are now abandoning the community and choice in favor of the corporate customer."

Indeed.

And from desktop environments (Gnome, KDE) to init -> systemd, developers seem to have forgotten in many cases that there are people (both individual and corporate) who use Linux for real work, who need stability to get their jobs done, in favour of the newest "gee-whiz" conceptual "features," many of which have not been requested by the end-users of Linux. The corporate users have the time and resources to retrain their staff to adapt to these gratuitous changes, but not without considerable cost; and private users are left in the dark about what will happen to their systems as the changes are implemented. Gnome and KDE continue to make radical changes to their desktop environments; OpenSUSE surprised us with BtrFS, systemd, and stuff like PulseAudio and the like, and now we hear that Leap will be discontinued, that everything will move to package virtualization, but we don't need to know the details because 'everything will be lovely, lovely by and by...'

Re: The real elephant in the room (slightly off-topic)

"...totally law abiding owner of their software;"

Never forget that you almost never OWN software of any type that you acquire from anyone (including, ironically, Gnu/Linux), you only hold a (revokable) license to use it. Yes, the vast majority of open source providers will never jerk the rug from under you, but there have been instances where open source software has been unexpectedly transferred to entities that were not so friendly. And remember, we're talking about other things than executables, e.g. ebooks: If an ebook provider (Microsoft comes to mind) decides to terminate their ebook library program, poof! the books for which you purchased licenses are just gone (unless you've hacked their library to obtain a private copy, thereby technically becoming a felon). You otherwise have no recourse, because the library no longer exists.

Re: history

"It's all optional. Some distros avoid the whole thing. There is still choice."

For the moment. Given the responses by OpenSUSE to pushback from the desktop community, very soon it will NOT be optional; and probably not long after that, most of the other distros will fall in line the way they did with systemd.

US schools sue Meta, Google and friends over 'youth mental health crisis'

We won't change what we're doing, but- Oh, look at the neat tools we're giving you!

'"We want teens to be safe online. We've developed more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including supervision tools that let parents limit the amount of time their teens spend on Instagram, and age verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences," Antigone Davis, global head of safety at Meta told.'

Pretty much says it all. This is very much worse than closing the barn door after the horses have left.

World Cup apps pose a data security and privacy nightmare

Fans who don't use smart phones etc. need not try to attend?

I guess that if I don't have a smart phone or tablet I won't be able to get into Qatar at all, then. (Granted, few fans will be likely to have that lifestyle, but still...

Infosec still (mostly) a boys club

Interesting graphic there...

Maybe a good start would be to reduce the number of pinheads (all of the boys in your graphic) surrounding those women. :-)

IBM updates desktop mainframe emulator

z/OS, blah... give me z/VM!

As a 30-year IBM mainframe veteran, I'm still experiencing withdrawal after my retirement, because I can't find a text-editor as user-friendly, flexible and extendable (with Rexx) as VM/CMS's Xedit. I have been wishing for years for an emulated z/VM system that I could use for my personal hobby work, but the closest available so far is pre-Xedit VM/370. :-(

This rope-laying, ever-growing robot may one day explore your blood vessels

Where does the robot store its liquid polymer, and when it has done its work, what happens to the tube? One hopes that it degrades safely into non-toxic waste?

Google challenges US ISPs with 100Gbps fiber broadband

100Gbps, available on a spotty basis hardly anywhere

When Google announced that Kansas City would be the pilot city for their first iteration, everyone was very enthusiastic. After a year, it became clear that the service would not be available in low-income areas of the city, nor in apartment or condominium buildings. As far as I know, there has been little if any improvement in coverage in greater KC, and until now, Google has been very quiet about the state of their experiment.

Intel’s smartNICs probably aren’t for you (yet) says Intel

Catching up to the mainframe

Sounds like intel (and presumably its competitors) are finally catching up to IBM's 360+ architecture mainframe systems with respect to offloaded I/O function. In the 1960s IBM designed the 360 to use Channels (I/O subsystems) to perform I/O independently of the CPU. When soon after they introduced the first PC they tried to improve their I/O performance with their MicroChannel adapter, but it required high-precision clocking and was expensive to produce, so never got into competition.

Channel architecture allows the mainframe CPU to pass just device information and main memory buffer address to the channel, then continue running other tasks until the channel interrupts when its I/O operation is completed. I presume that these smartNICs/IPUs/DPUs will provide something similar to IBM's Channel subsystem?

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Both Electronics AND Electrical Engineers

Heh. Your article's title says "Electrical engineers...", but the article body talks mostly about Elecronics engineers. I suspect that both are endangered species these days; the Electrical engineers (producers of the electric power grid, building wiring, etc) as well as those who produce the hardware on which our software runs. I suppose that the only hardware "Electronics" engineers that are still thriving are the folks who work at chip foundries.

Broadcom sketches out VMware ambitions that stretch from mainframe to cloud

"...from mainframe to cloud"

I will be most interested to see how VMware competes with z/VM on IBM's mainframe systems. :-)