Posts by John Sanders

Microsoft tells people to prepare for AI search engine that goes Bing!

Google used to work well

Google used to work well up until a few years ago where they started removing and censoring people, terms and sites.

Rather than giving the best search results they are concentrating on ADS and curated content at the behest of western governments.

I know this will sound like a joke but I've been resorting lately to use Yandex when I can't find anything else on Google/Bing that approaches what I'm looking for, specially when looking for old newspaper articles, and no, I'm usually not looking for "controversial things".

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

Re: The problem with a cloud-hosted Windows desktop...

Windows doesn't have that vulnerability there thanks to Office being only able to run on Windows, as someone else pointed out you will take Office from the cold dead hands of the normies and only at that moment.

I have always been impressed by most people who depend on Word/Excel/Outlook, etc not being able to use anything but the most superficial functionality. Very few of these users can justify why or how they need specifically Office to do their work. Through my career I've known 2 or 3 people who knew how to use it and depended on Office. The rest just memorised where things are and click on one or three buttons.

I use LibreOffice since it forked from OpenOffice and I always get asked how to do stuff in Excel that I do in LO, I always have to figure it out for them, even a basic googling is out of the reach of most normies.

Most of the real requirement for Office used to come from 3rd party software who would use Office's DLLs to generate documents and reports and send emails via Outlook ActiveX/DCOM components. I wonder what will happen now that this software is going to be cloud based (because reasons).

I'm fed up with all this bullshit propaganda of "all revenue comes from the cloud" yes, that is not difficult if you move your player base from one product to the other, it is not that most people buy the cloud product, it is that the cloud product has been made deliberately cheaper and more convenient and publicised more because it is more convenient for the publisher. This is the same as adobe making CC a subscription, of course all their revenue now comes from the cloud edition of photoshop, they don't sell any other version.

https://blog.conradchavez.com/2016/01/06/can-you-buy-adobe-software-without-a-subscription/

Re: Wishful thinking

Used to think like you. Linux is not sub-standard, once you accept that it is not a copy of Windows but its own thing you start having less friction everywhere. The freedom in Linux is real. it has a steep learning curve perhaps but it is the difference between knowing how to cook and being able to just eat from a restaurant. Eating in a restaurant is nice, but what if there is no restaurant? What if the restaurant is forcing you to eat bugs?

Using Linux here full time since 2011, both at home and at work. I used mostly Ubuntu and lately migrating desktops to Arch. I'm not going back to the IT prison known as Windows.

I have no problems printing, no problems with hardware, no problems with anything but some old CAD software that I run on Wine (although this improves every now and then, that CAD software doesn't run in Windows itself anymore since vista) Once a piece of hardware works on Linux it keeps working forever. The sole exception NVIDIA Cards, Nvidia does not really support Linux, they let you use their cards under some circumstances and if you meet certain requirements.

Mac People buy hardware compatible with Macs. So if you're in the Linux side of things: Buy hardware that works with Linux, almost 0% issues guaranteed.

Don't expect Linux to be a 1:1 replacement of Windows, it is not.

Take your time, it is not that Windows doesn't have problems, it is that you know how to solve them in Windows. Often what on Windows means a full reinstall on Linux is a couple of commands.

Talk in Trump's tweets tells whether tale is true: Code can mostly spot Prez lies from wording

Re: Why not just...

orange_man = "bad";

echo($orange_man);

There you go, AI doesn't need to be be more sophisticated than that.

Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server

Re: The joke is on you!

I've said it multiple times, If MS wants to do you in the rear, they ask and people just assume the position.

Anything to avoid having to think.

Re: Just go Linux

Spot on.

The Chinese are here: Xiaomi to bring phones to the UK next month

Proud owner of a MI Max 2

Paid £150 for it, runs like a dream, unlooked boot loader and customized to liking.

The only concern is if Xiaomi is going to start charging proper UK prices now that they're launching officially.

Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS source from the museum and sticks it in GitHub

Wake me up

When MS open sources anything of relevance no strings attached.

It may be poor man's Photoshop, but GIMP casts a Long Shadow with latest update

Re: I miss Deluxe Paint

Just tried and it is easy.

Draw something.

Select an area using any of the select tools, area, rectangle, oval, etc.

On the Edit menu, select copy,

Click on the pencil/paint brush tool.

In the tool options, choose clipboard as brush

De-select the area, menu select choose none

Draw.

* Bonus:, adjust size of the brush using the '[' and ']' keys (like photoshop)

Very easy to figure out and I never did it before. GIMP is soooo complicated.

PD: I also loved DPaint, Amiga Rulez!

Windows 10 Linux Distribution Overload? We have just the thing

Re: I still think they're majoring in the minors. again.

>> Gullible idiots (on other sites) keep trying to convince me MS is OSS friendly these days,

>> someone even thought they were the highest annual contributor to the Linux kernel.

I hear your pain. I'm on the same opinion, I don't see the point on running any Linux stuff on windows, just doesn't make sense.

Australia's Snooper's Charter: Experts react, and it ain't pretty

It seems that...

Western democracies are laying up all the necessary infrastructure to go full blown tyranny.

The funny bit is that nothing this would do if pass will address the primary problem, they try to alleviate the secondary symptoms which will exacerbate the problem and lead to the inevitable outcome.

Anyway, all the the Australian government has to do is that all the IT infrastructure and devices is made by cisco, they seem to come with plenty backdoors as standard.

Google Spectre whizz kicked out of Caesars, blocked from DEF CON over hack 'attack' tweet

Re: Hum

And I don't need to see any more to know that.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

"the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

This is because when IPv6 was first published it was DELIBERATELY made incompatible with IPv4 a little fact that was pointed out to the committee who came with IPv6 and not only ignored but smug at.

It never ceases to amaze me to see that the IPv6 creators are the ones stubbornly rejecting reality and somehow if it is not adopted is because the rest of the internet can't see the brilliance of its godly design.

IPv6 is and always have been garbage, it forces you to have a DNS and DHCP servers in place for it to work correctly, and does too many automatic things that that makes it a pain to deal with. And lest not forget the many, many times it has been changed, it has taken them 19 years to come with the final RFC spec.

All that was needed was an extra 2 octets on the addressing, that's all. (This is roughly speaking for the technical pedants out there)

Instead we got an over-engineered mess that is backwards incompatible and somehow it is everybody's fault is not adopted.

Does anybody think that in December 1998 the people who designed it had the required expertise to do so*? I doubt it, the internet had only been running at large for three years at the time.

(*I'm not talking about the bits and bolts, talking about what was that people and markets wanted)

Add backwards compatibility to IPv6 and everyone jumps on board next day SIMPLE.

Drink this potion, Linux kernel, and tomorrow you'll wake up with a WireGuard VPN driver

Re: Why?

The parts that go into the kernel are very small.

Bloat is not a problem as you can tailor the kernel to match whatever you require, and you're not forced to load all possible modules at all times.

Me wants to have as much functionality and drivers as possible.

A big kernel does not equate bloat, the project is big because the drivers are maintained in parallel to the rest of the kernel, you're not forced to load or use everything under the sun.

Official: AMD now stands for All the Money, Dudes!

AMD Is great

And they fully support open source Linux graphics drivers, for me instant buy.

ReactOS 0.4.9 release metes out stability and self-hosting, still looks like a '90s fever dream

Re: Try out the UI

>> but sadly they seem to have concluded that UNIX kernels are shit

No, not at all, the reason for reimplementing a NT kernel is so you can use native Windows drivers on ReactOS.

Re: RINW10

>> They have form here remember this?

>> "DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run?"

The north remembers!

Samsung’s new phone-as-desktop is slick, fast and ready for splash-down ... somewhere

>> Overall the DeX Pad does a fine job of almost everything … except giving you a reason to use it.

We can say the same of pretty much 90% of the IT gadgets/stuff that has come in the last 10 years.

ZX Spectrum reboot firm boss delays director vote date again

Dramas like these...

Are only possible on the UK.

Where the "We're too busy following all the rules to pay attention to the fire" is 100% doable.

A fine vintage: Wine has run Microsoft Solitaire on Linux for 25 years

I use Wine daily

I depend on running Visio 2003 to produce diagrams constantly. It runs great.

As per running games all my gaming on Linux is native now thanks to Steam and latest mesa 18.x

However a couple of weeks back I tried to run the first Borderlands on steam on Windows via wine, (there is no Linux version) out of curiosity to see what would happen. It worked 100% including both the xbox360 controller and online multi-player.

When wine works is fantastic.

@Shadmeister.

You can run 32bit and 64bit applications in wine simultaneously.

What you can't do is mix 32 and 64 bit applications in the same wine prefix.

As long as each application is installed on their own separate profile they can be run simultaneously.

there are two executables wine (32 bit) and wine64 (64 bits) Wine knows which one to use depending on the configuration of the profile, that is why only the command "wine" is generally used.

Hope this helps.

The Notch contagion is spreading slower than phone experts thought

Re: Keep notches where they belong

My man!

You win the beer!

Re: Whut?

>>> Being a non smart phone user I thought that this might be a warning of some virusy thing but... It turned out to be click bait.

The good'n'old ElReg, Duh!

We woulnd't be here otherwise!

>> Many models will never wash up in mature markets like the UK, but it's what the production lines are churning out. The survey includes many models not marketed here, but popular for providing buyers in emerging markets with large displays and hefty batteries. That skews the survey towards larger phones.

Oh shock, oh horror, some people are more concerned by function than form.

And even more shocking, some people buy phones to actually use them, and not as a piece of jewellery.

Sysadmin shut down server, it went ‘Clunk!’ but the app kept running

Re: type 'reboot' in the local console instead of the remote one

I keep asking the same question to people who religiously refuse to reboot or patch for dread of the "downtime"

I ask: Is this the fire department server? Police? Emergency services? The NHS?

No?

Then patch & reboot out of hours during your period of least activity.

Git365. Git for Teams. Quatermass and the Git Pit. GitHub simply won't do now Microsoft has it

It shall be called

Gitzune!

Ubuntu reports 67% of users opt in to on-by-default PC specs slurp

I have several monsters

Running Ubuntu with Ryzens and i7s, multiple terabytes of storage and tons of RAM (because why the heck not, I do not want/need my systems swapping)

There are lots of people like me running contemporary Linux computers, but we're all mindful of our privacy and say no to the slurping.

Now Microsoft ports Windows 10, Linux to homegrown CPU design

Obvious questions...

Why?

What for exactly?

What problem does it solve? (That isn't solved already)

Microsoft loves Linux so much its R Open install script rm'd /bin/sh

This is known as:

chmod 777 ALL THE THINGS

And it is as dumb as "rm * -fr"

But well.

Devuan ships second stable cut of its systemd-free Linux

Re: Storm in a teacup

I swear to god that at this point I think all the "anti-systemd" crusade is like the flat earth society an internet trolling of epic proportions.

WannaCry reverse-engineer Marcus Hutchins hit with fresh charges

Re: Plea Deal

I would suggest that you pay attention to how the FBI operates and behaves, too many Hollywood movies have you confused.

1,300 customers of Brit bank TSB defrauded due to botched IT migration

Reality vs expectations.

If all you thing that it can go wrong in a cashless society is the inconvenience of not having access to your bank account you're in for a rude awakening.

US websites block netizens in Europe: Why are they ghosting EU? It's not you, it's GDPR

Re: Overreach

Careful what you wish for...

Microsoft gives users options for Office data slurpage – Basic or Full

Re: It's a subtle plan

>> No, it's just try to kidnap you into the GPL ecosystem - which is just nasty as the Windows one.

And when I got to this point I realized you're just a troll.

Re: "Invasive" or "Very Invasive"

I've been saying it for years, MS says assume the position and people bend over.

Anything so they don't have to think.

Boffins: Michael Jackson's tilt was a criminally smooth trick

There...

You win the beer this week X-D

Git push origin undo-my-last-disaster

I have created my own thing

It is called PissOps, we do it every Friday, pub time.

For fcuk sake IT industry, stop with the made up market-droid lingo, and fashion reinvented-wheel of the week.

BT bets farm on consumers: Announces one network to rule 'em all

Re: Makes a mockery of the CMA decision that EE and BT operate is distinct and different markets

>> Who are these technically illiterate anonymous folk that sit on the CMA making these decisions?

It is time for you to understand that there is no "good" and "bad" people, just people with economic interests and different degrees of power. Whether they are literate or not is a different matter with no bearing whatsoever on the business at hand.

Glibc 'abortion joke' diff tiff leaves Richard Stallman miffed

Re: Wait, what?

@JohnFen

>> ...is hard to interpret as anything but another indication of the ongoing decline of the software industry.

I think you mean society as a whole.

Remember humor is dangerously subversive to SJW as it doesn't allow them to control the language, and an SJW needs to control language to set the narrative so they can't achieve power without opposition.

Having said that, in my humble opinion anyone ever butt-hurt by such an obvious joke is not fit for purpose.

Microsoft vows to bridge phones to PCs, and this time it means it. Honest.

There is a reason for no one achieving this.

The reason is simple yet tricky to grasp.

No one knows where to go with it, nor which problem are they trying to solve.

Easy :-)

I (in my infinite modesty) have been blessed with the means to know what's required to do this successfully but no one will implement it because it is what is good for the users and not the bottom line of <insert company name here>.

It is easier to explain it than it is for people to grasp it's significance.

All that it requires is to integrate a remote desktop type of functionality into the phone.

You connect your phone with the usb cable to the pc and magically a window appears with your mobile screen, you double click on it and make it full screen, and use any app in your phone fullscreen with a mouse and a keyboard.

You can copy and paste, drag and drop between your mobile and the computer when the window is not full screen.

Done, that is the only stuff required, who has it done it? nobody, who will do it? nobody.

Why? because few understand why that functionality is important. Bear in mid Microsoft does, they will not allow this, and Google does too, they know MS won't allow it.

Leave it to Beaver: Unity is long gone and you're on your GNOME

Re: Race to the bottom

>> all symptomatic of this hostile takeover, seemingly coordinated between ostensibly separate

>> groups but which was in fact just one, almost like a patent troll operating many shell companies.

Yet strangely all of it perfectly GPL compliant.

For fuck sake people.

Re: On the face of it

The alt+right mouse is cool if you know it, and aren't mum, dad, grandpa or grandma.

No reason to have 1 pixel window borders on the default theme, no reason.

Re: On the face of it

The window borders 1 or 2 pixels wide are the most annoying thing I have ever encountered, it is one of the easiest things to fix ever yet 7 years down the road they keep doing the same.

I know about using alt+right mouse to scale a window, but Grandma and Grandpa want to aim with the mouse and won't use a keyboard short-cut.

It is the only shame I can find in Xubuntu and it is shocking no one has ever thought on that.

Re: On the face of it

>> Admittedly, I'm a Xubuntu fan…

My man!

>> from the day Unity thing was dropped on us, give or take a few hours.

I would add Gnome3 to the mix of undesirable DEs

Mate or XFCE all the way. Mate is now a better Gnome than Gnome ever was, Mate does seem to succeed in an area where Gnome3 fails consistently, and this is bug fixing.

OK, this time it's for real: The last available IPv4 address block has gone

The lack of IPv4....

No one is going to move to IPv6 because of this, ISPs have plenty of IPv4 addresses, and not just that, they have the technical expertise to free many more in case they need them from their old networks.

All it does is increase the price of the commodity which has been made scarce, and prevents competition as the primary resource to start an ISP is IPv4 addresses.

Enjoy your IPv6 designed at a time where people couldn't possibly anticipate what its adoption would entail 20 years later.

Torvalds schedules Linux kernel 5.0, then maybe delays 'meaningless' release

Power eficiency

What about the noticeable power savings when using 4.17?

These not worth mention?

2001: A Space Odyssey has haunted pop culture with anxiety about rogue AIs for half a century

Re: Ah well, back to my PowerPoint slides

Yes I agree 90 percent of the film is boring nonsense, the only interesting bits are the HAL bits.

There is a very good way to prove that what I say is true, what do people celebrate about the movie?

The long, long, long silent scenes of the space shuttle?

The color-fest at the end?

They remember "I can't do that Dave".

18.04 beta is as good a time as any to see which Ubuntu flavour tickles your Budgie, MATE

Mate

MATE all the way, XFCE progress is too slow sadly.

If I was Canonical I would make MATE the primary option and Gnome 3 a spin.

Seriously, MATE is that good.

Microsoft says 'majority' of Windows 10 use will be 'streamlined S mode'

@AC

>> Like one of the commenters wrote, most drank the Kool-Aid long ago and have fixed on Windows as the One True Grail long ago.

No, the industry decided to do that because MS is an ecosystem where you can make money in a traditional fashion that normies understand well: "I give you Windows/Service for £X and you resell at £X+100".

The industry locked themselves with MS around their necks and what the industry decides makes them more money with the least effort is pushed into the masses.

And the masses like convenience above all, Windows gives them plenty of that.

This dynamic is called market inertia and it is hard to overcome. But the question is, does it need to be? certainly not for the normies.

It is you IT professional who should start looking at other stuff, not because MS is evil and wants to control your computer, it is because you who will benefit the most from learning FOSS stuff.