Posts by nematoad

Court voids 34,000 unfair Fuji Xerox contracts

"...when the two sides of a B2B contract are not balanced"

There has been a judgement on this very topic.

Bates v Post Office Ltd (No 3) [2019] EWHC 606 (QB)

There the judge held that the terms and conditions imposed by the Post Office in their contract appointing a new post-master contained unfair, onerous and unreasonable terms. The PO held that the incoming Post-Master was an equal in a business setting, something the judge, Mr. Justice Fraser, dismissed as completely wrong and that the PO had all the power to impose any conditions it liked on the new Post-Master and had abused that power.

The PO got their head handed to them on a plate and they went on to lose the whole case, as many will remember.

So in England and Wales small businesses have a shield against a powerful potential business partner and it looks like SMEs in Australia are now similarly protected.

Re: "Fujifilm will invoice the customer for licensed software irrespective of delivery by Fujifilm."

Isn't that a variation on the trick that the likes of BMW are trying to pull?

This could be another contribution to the lawyers' yacht fund.

Report slams UK plan to become 'science superpower' by 2030

Re: Part of BREXIT was to become Self-Sufficient

Why should Dublin bother to mock the UK.

It's not them in the shit regarding science funding.

More like a satisfied smile as scientists and departments move out of Britain. Some might like to move to the Republic of Ireland, I know I did when I was lucky enough to work there.

Re: no "specific, measurable outcomes", no delivery plan, a short-termist outlook...

"...specific, measurable outcomes"

Well we got blue passports and the crown on our pint glasses, so that is some sort of outcome.

Mind you we could have had those things whilst we were part of the EU so that does devalue the "benefits" a little.

Fancy a freshened up SLAX or ChromeOS replacement Peppermint OS?

Options, options, options.

Saying that, it's good to see an easy, friendly Devuan remix and we'd be happy to see more of those."

Amen to that brother!

And it's nice to see another distro joining the "no systemd" fraternity with Slax.

Russia fines Google $374 million for letting the truth about Ukraine be told

Re: Gosh, really ?

"Russia would have to develop its own domestic technology and tech firms as the country would not be reversing course on progress."

For a given value of "progress" of course.

This is straight out of the North Korean play-book and look how well North Korea are doing.

Disentangling the Debian derivatives: Which should you use?

Re: APT was a killer feature

I was in "RPM dependency hell..."

Yes, me too, so that when I discovered PCLinuxOS had all the tools from Mandrake and it had the apt system of package management that was it, and I have stuck with PCLOS ever since.

There's something about systemd that puts me off trying the likes of Debian and its derivatives so although there might be features that would appeal to me I have tended to steer clear. Keeping my boxes on the straight and narrow is one thing, wrestling with a vampire squid is another.

Systemd supremo Lennart Poettering leaves Red Hat for Microsoft

Re: Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

"You can fool all of the people some of them and some of the people all of the time..."?

Re: Perfect Fit

Yes, rolling around in the Registry.

Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

It looks like he is following in the footsteps of Miguel de Icaza.

Come in, bugger Linux about and then piss off to Microsoft.

Gnome and systemd seem to share traits. The developers seem to be doctrinaire, resistant to constructive criticism and have the attitude "If you don't like it, lump it."

Systemd may still be with us but at least there is a chance that the rot will stop with Poetterings departure.

Old-school editor Vim hits version 9 with faster scripting language

Re: Others preferred

It's a strange thing, but mc is widely used and is the first thing I install when doing a rebuild, but not many people seem to know about mcedit.

I took a Redhat course and the instructor was greatly surprised when I told him that the editor I use for .config scripts was mcedit. He had never heard of it and he was the instructor!

It's simple and it works, oh and the key bindings are of course the same as the mc ones.

Amazon shows off robot warehouse workers that won't complain, quit, unionize...

It's a start.

"Speculation was rampant that Amazon was replacing people with robots …"

Well it's better than treating people like robots, I suppose.

As elsergiovolador says above who will they sell all this stuff to if no-one has a job?

And no, even with robots working in those warehouses, I still won't do business with Amazon.

Linux Foundation thinks it can get you interested in smartNICs

Oh.

"...these devices have been crafted to offload a growing number of infrastructure tasks including storage, networking, and security functions,"

I thought that that was systemd's job.

Looks like Redhat's right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

Re: Why

Not so much why as how?

When I see the flight attendants struggling with trolleys and things up the single aisle I wonder how they put up with it. It doesn't look easy. So what is the magic trick?

Having 200+ people on flights lasting up to 11 hours I do hope that they put more loos in. Standing waiting in the aisle for the loo with other people trying to get back to their seats is not one of my favourite occupations. Single aisle aircraft are the cattle trucks of the skies. Flying in a twin aisled a/c is chalk and cheese with a single aisled one. You can at least move in twin aisled ones.

I hope that I am lucky enough never to have to fly in an A321XLR.

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Users hate WIndows but they despise Linux.

If only 1% use Linux how do the other 99% know enough about it to "despise" it?

Well I don't know about printing as I have never had any problems setting up my printers.

When it comes to audio, you might have a point.

The "magic bullet" that was supposed to sort out all the problems Linux had with audio was Pulseaudio. I have found it a complete PITA and the first thing I do when setting up a new install is ditch that piece of junk and drop to ALSA. It works for me and I don't have to put up with all the screeching and distortion that Pulseaudio seems to give on my systems.

Re: Some concerns though

"And they are wasting their time."

If they want to waste their time why should you be concerned?

"But that's not what Linux desktop fans want. They want Windows crushed and bleeding underneath the Linux juggernaut."

Speak for yourself.

Personally I don't give a damn about what other people use for their computing needs. So long as no-one forces me to use Windows then they can do what they want.

As for crushing Windows, who cares?

Microsoft seems quite capable of making Windows so unpleasant that people may think about moving to an alternative. I had jobs doing desktop support and sysadmin on Windows and the experience made me look for another OS. I found Linux and have used it ever since but if other people want to stick with Windows why should I care? I regard Windows users as harmless and if they don't bother me I won't bother them.

The truth is a lot of Linux users are happy with the choices available, natural selection will weed out the weaker offerings and the whole ecosystem will get better and better.

Amazon accused of obstructing probe into deadly warehouse collapse

Re: Speaking of...

"I figured. And THAT is the reason I've never had a Prime membership."

Then you can't have bought anything from them.

In my experience if you get anything at all from them you will be enrolled in that Prime nonsense and as EricB123 says getting free of their clammy grasp is not easy.

In my case I had to make several calls to their call centre and ask them to place a flag on my account so that in the unlikely event of me ever doing business with them again I would not have to go through all the rigmarole of declining their kind offer.

IBM ordered to pay $1.6b to BMC

Re: Looks like someone pissed off a judge.

"...offends the sense of justice and propriety that the public expects from American businesses."

I'd say that IBM's conduct exactly fulfils the public's expectations of American businesses.

See also:

Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft.

Minimal, systemd-free Alpine Linux releases version 3.16

Re: Alpine Linux is indeed different

It's horses for courses.

Some people want to broaden their skills, explore new avenues and try out new things.

This distro looks like it will fill their needs nicely.

25 years ago I was that person, tired of all the Windows nonsense I was excited to discover Linux. I bought a copy of Red Hat 5 and I was away. New things to learn and new ways of getting things done.

That was then. Now I am retired and Linux is just a tool I use to get to places I want to go to. Computing is no longer a job or a hobby. Nowadays I want things to "just work" so I'll stick to PCLinuxOS. It works, is simple to use and configure so I'll let those people looking for a challenge have a look at Alpine.

Isn't it a wonderful thing that we have a choice when choosing a distro that we can usually find one that we feel comfortable with?

Ex-spymaster and fellow Brexiteers' emails leaked by suspected Russian op

Re: some dodgy plotting

"Brexit was a mess but not as bad a disaster as the Ukraine war..."

True, but Brexit was the result of a decision by a scant majority of the British People 53% to 47%. If I recall correctly.

The invasion of the Ukraine on the other hand is a result of a kleptomaniac demagogue trying to live out his fantasies of a new Russian empire.

There will be damage done to both but only one was the result of a conscious choice.

Amazon puts 'creepy' AI cameras in UK delivery vans

Re: Keep laughing..

"...and reminded me always tow the party line!"

Where do you want to tow it to? I hope it's not too heavy.

The word you want is toe.

From the days of bare-knuckle fighting when the two contestants would have to come together in the middle of the ring and put their feet touching the centre line.

Hence "To toe the line".

"It's about time Amazon got some control over them."

Good God! Are you telling me that Amazon has the capability to control their drivers bowels?

That should make for an interesting proposal if Amazon decide to patent it!

Ever done a delivery job?

I'd say not, I have, and the pressure you can be put under to make time on your round can be unbelievable. So try and understand why Amazon drivers are peeing in bottles, etc.

Hint, it's not for fun.

"Amazon did not respond to The Register's request for comment."

I'm not surprised.

What are they going to say?

"We are a devious, amoral bunch of control freaks, who are so in love with technology that we are prepared to treat all our workers as machines who can be treated like shit."

There is only one thing bigger than Bezos's ego and that is their lust for even greater profits.

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

"There are still a selection of distros that eschew it altogether,"

You missed out PCLinuxOS and Slackware.

Choice is still there and I for one am glad of it.

Systemd, the thing that keeps on taking.

SAP attracts further criticism for Russia presence, despite promise to leave

"I don't know who they are defending them from," he added

Russia's best mate, China?

New audio server Pipewire coming to next version of Ubuntu

I agree,

I reluctantly used Pulseaudio as I was having a lot of problems with the sound on a new install and because it's the recommended service to use on the distro I use.

When I went to play one of my games the noise was horrendous, hissing, howling and so on. I quickly knocked Pulseaudio on the head and reverted to using ALSA. The sound returned to normal and I seemed to have more control over the server with alsamixer.

As Pulseaudio runs on top of ALSA what's the point of Pulseaudio? Or is it another of Poettering's attempts to have total control of your system.

I can't wait to try pipewire. Things can only get better.

Now where have I heard that phrase before? :-)

Mozilla opens testing for Manifest v3 extensions in Firefox

Re: Remind me again...

Don't be silly.

The browser is there to sell things to you.

It's for the benefit of the sellers and Google.

What you what or need doesn't come into it.

Apple scraps 3-day return to office amid COVID-19 cases

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

"...at least one day a week on site with mentees. (is that a word?)"

Yes.

Mentee

a person who is counselled or trained by a mentor

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: Such a chatastrophy

"Breaks, Check."

Well my car does, all the time, as it's old and badly maintained.

The word I think you were looking for is "brakes"

Re: Why are they all the same?

I agree with Jake, the Win95 look works, has been used for a very long time and a lot of people have got used to it. GUIs are a means to an end, they should be there to let you do things and then get out of the way. They are not an end in themselves

There is an old saying "Form follows function" . A hammer looks like a hammer because that is what it needs to look like. The Win95 GUI gives you all the tools you need to start a program, organise you files and generally do thing on you computer. It works, so why change it?

FOSS is Darwinian in some respects, there is survival of the fittest, and there may be reasons why the choice of the GUI has come down to two models.

Oracle really does owe HPE $3b after Supreme Court snub

No, really?

"We are pleased with the court's order,"

Yes, with 3 billion dollars heading towards your bank account, why wouldn't you be?

Microsoft tests ‘Suggested Actions’ in Windows 11. Insiders: Can we turn it off?

Re: What does it say ...

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”.

Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved

Re: Offensive and poorlt thought through

"We struggle to cope only in real-world social situations,"

When I was working in a desktop support team we had one person drafted in as we were short-handed at the time. Now normally he was in the development team and was really good at his job. He was the "go-to guy" when there was any problem sorting out awkward software.

When it came to dealing with users he was way out of his depth, abrupt, argumentative and sometimes down-right rude. In the end he was more or less kept in the office and used as a liaison with the programmers, the network team and the sysadmins. They all knew him and he knew them so was much more at ease and he did a fine job.

I know that we desktop support people were regarded as lesser beings, sort of IT janitors, but you needed social skills, tact and above all patience and this guy did not, so he was placed in a very difficult position.

I have no idea if he was on the Autistic spectrum but from my observations he may very well have been.

Palantir summons specter of nuclear conflict as share price collapses

Re: So in his argument...

"I dont know too many businesses that imply that they go to war with their customers."

Oracle?

At last, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 slips out

Re: How do you like them apples?

" Why don’t you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don’t you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don’t you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?"

Oddball Kelly's Heroes

RISC-V CEO seeks 'world domination' by winning over the likes of Intel

Re: That RISC-V TRS-80 M100....

"...but it's obsolete today and there's no real need for it."

No, maybe not but is it costing you anything?

What is it with people, new to the forum, moaning about what other people do with their own time, money and effort?

People do this sort of thing because they want to and can do, what harm is it doing?

I think that the more of this sort of thing that goes on the better. If it doesn't interest you, then ignore it.

Unity and Trinity: New releases for forks of abandoned Linux desktops

Re: YALD * 2

"Here we go again. "

No, here you go again.

For God's sake give it a rest. You sound like a broken record.

You obviously have a problem with other people spending their time, money and brain power as they wish.

Cool down, relax and realise that just because there is a lot of choice in the FOSS world doesn't mean that you have to follow every avenue that people are exploring. Or unless you want to help out, it doesn't cost you a penny.

Microsoft points at Linux and shouts: Look, look! Privilege-escalation flaws here, too!

"Linux security is always about letting the right people have root."

So what happens when most distros use sudo?

Is that not an invitation to abuse the system, open security holes and basically let the ordinary user do what ever they want?

PCLinuxOS is one of the few distros that stick to using su and surely that must be a better way of keeping things under control.

Does anyone have a list of other distros not using sudo by default?

Re: Auto update and reboot anyone?

"Has not been strictly neccessary for a decade or two..."

True, if you are not using Pulseaudio. Another brainwave from that master of reboots Lennart Poettering. There if you install it, uninstall it or just change things you have to reboot. No ifs no buts.

I have no idea if you have to do the reboot shuffle with systemd, being fortunate to use a distro (PCLinuxOS) that will not touch it with a barge-pole.

So yes, mostly you can do things without having to reboot all the time but look out! There are forces conspiring to get you into the habit, just like Windows. :-(

Fancy a remix? Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon have also hit 22.04

Re: Just what the world needed - two more Linux distros

...at least admit it is a waste of time."

Is it your time they are wasting?

No? Then what difference does it make?

You keep going on about the waste of time, waste of resources and pleas for a unified approach as that would be more efficient. Why?

Are the activities of other people doing what they want affecting you in any way? Are these selfish people depriving you of something?

Probably not, so why all this irritation, anger and hammering of the keyboard?

In the FOSS world people can please themselves. Spend time developing things and mixing and matching as it suits them.

The F in FOSS does not only stand for free as in free beer. It also stands for the freedom to let people please themselves and do what they want in that world.

Debian faces firmware furore from FOSS freedom fighters

Re: I like Debian, but it has its own share of a*holes too.

"most resources are wasted in petty fights..."

Yes maybe they are, but unless the use of these resource are stopping you from doing something who cares?

People start projects, maintain programs and fork other peoples stuff because they want to. A lot of people are not in it for the money or as a job, they do it for the pleasure of building something that others may appreciate or find useful. Just stopping some of the forks does not mean that the devs will move onto something "more productive".

No one is forcing you to use any of the applications, utilities or OSs that are on offer so why worry about the time and effort other people are putting into their projects. They are not costing you anything in time, money or resources so why all the angst?

See choice is a two way street in FOSS. You have a choice to use or not programs and the devs have the choice in what they decide to work on.

Hard choices.

Using my boxes without proprietary blobs would be nice. Reality gets in the way however and some things need the proprietary stuff to work properly.

Take the nvidia drivers in Linux. Nouveau works, not well, but it works. The trouble is if you want to do anything other than basic computing you really need the nvidia drivers.

I am having real problems with nouveau. For some reason my distro which used to install the nvidia driver for your card, if you wanted to use it, doesn't seem to work on my main machine and I'm stuck with nouveau. With that if I try and play a video I get stuttering, nasty artefacts and sometimes it will just slow to a crawl. I have been helped by my distro's forum and one of the suggestions was because my video card is getting old I should get a new one. That's not going to happen. Have you seen the price of new cards? That is if you can get one, and even second-hand ones are currently out of my reach.

My old card is perfectly capable of doing all that I need, all that's holding it back is the FOSS driver I am having to use. So while in theory having FOSS drivers to go along with my FOSS OS would be perfect, sometimes you have to compromise and use the tools that best meet your needs.

I would love to be able to ditch all the proprietary stuff on my machines, that's why I use Linux, but real life keeps me anchored to stuff I can neither examine or entirely trust.

AI-powered browser extension to automatically click away cookie pop-ups now promised

Fox guarding the hen-house.

"Some of the organizations forced to implement these pop-ups have designed them specifically to be tricky to navigate, or use dark patterns to fool someone into selecting the opposite desired option,"

Right, I see that from time to time and wish it would go away, but;

"A team of researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Google..."

Right there is the problem.

If you have ever had to click through the Youtube cookie dialog you will know what I mean. Who in their right mind has boxes that allow you to switch off cookies showing the palest of pale blue change when you decline a load of data that Google wants to take for itself? And then goes back to the white original colour after you have chosen?

Aesthetics? I don't think so. It's just one example of Google desperately trying to grab anything they can get about your internet habits.

And they then expect us to believe that this project is for our benefit?

Pull the other one, it has got bells on.

Day 7 of the great Atlassian outage: IT giant still struggling to restore access

Re: Could be 2 more weeks according to a Reddit comment

"...and have taken steps to avoid a recurrence in the future."

And so should you by looking to move to somewhere else.

On-prem there is usually someone to carry the can.

SaaS, "Who ya gonna call?"

Why OpenAI recruited human contractors to improve GPT-3

Eh?

"Aligning language models like GPT-3 may make them less likely to generate text that is less toxic, biased, and more accurate,"

Now my parsing of this sentence may be wrong but surely this is an example of a double negative.

If the idea is to try and stop the AI from producing offensive text then anything that stops it from being "less toxic, biased, and more accurate" is not going in the right direction.