Re: Notsomuch.
I did - it is much better than Gnome 3; but a few things still annoy me.
2469 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
Sorry, but this sort of appeal isn't going to move me away from MATE.
I have just upgraded my desktop, I was running CentOS 6 which has reached end of life after 10 years.
CentOS 8 comes with Gnome 3, Mate is not an option. Gnome 3 is, for me, unusable - so after running RedHat/Centos since 1995 I have switched to Debian + Mate. A few teething issues, but works well.
Hopefully I will soon have a nice stable environment that I will not need to fiddle with for another decade.
you could call the company in question, speak to a real, live human being who could probably deal with it.
Today: you probably can't find a 'phone number, if you do you wait for ages listening to crap music and end up speaking to some inane bot - or if you are really lucky someone in Mumbai who has not got a script to deal with your problem.
Progress :-(
Maybe the El Reg reporter should have asked Google for information by means of a Subject Access Request - Google has to respond, as a matter of law.
If the user has not agreed to this data to be transferred out of the EU then that is another breach - depending on T&Cs agreed.
What if someone buys a 'phone and uses it as one - ie does not agree to T&Cs for play store, etc, as well - does the data still go ?
It says here that Boris is Bulgarian or Russian so will he be under special surveillance?
There are aspects of world political dominance. China has become an economic super power, that has given it the clout to throw political weight around and worry less about the consequences, think: Hong Kong, Uighurs Muslims, actions against Taiwan, ... There is a strong direction of travel and we need to look at where that will go to in 20, 50, 100 years time.
I know that the USA has bullied as well, but it is politically much freer than China. You can say things in front of the White House that would have you removed if you said similar in Tiananmen Square.
Decisions like this have many more facets than first meet the eye.
"Your customer is doing has installed xxx so sell them Microsoft xxx-enterprise".
Lots of things to be gleaned by looking at what is installed on a machine, even more by looking at web browser logs ... Who knows what they take as the telemetry information is encrypted before being sent to Redmond and there is not a tool that the user can use to decode it.
There are Open Source ERP systems. Take a look, do they do enough of what you need ? If so: write the bits that are missing (ie customise) and move over.
Yes: it will cost you, but it costs millions to migrate to SAP and then pay annual license fees - which costs more.
No support ? Work with others who use your chosen ERP to your mutual benefit. Push up to github/where-ever the code that you write: others will use it (if it is any good) and fix bugs and add features - which is to your benefit.
Some IT directors will refuse for the same reasons that they bought IBM & Microsoft.
The current trend of building the page with javascript in the browser is wrong. It just complicates things for the browser and means that the browser has to run javascript from all manner of places.
Server side rendering means that for the browser it is KISS.
An example of how the marketing bods have succeeded in persuading many to spend money in meaningless ways, often by hijacking some event and making it seem that the only "proper" way of doing it was by spending lots of money. Other examples include: black Friday; Valentine's day; mother's/father's day, ...
I am not churlish: I went to see my mum, often taking a plant for her garden; she appreciated that far more than over priced cut flowers.
Did you know that the 'tradition' of a man giving his girl a diamond engagement ring is the result of a 1930's De Beers marketing campaign. How impressionable we are!
The browser should, rather than identifying itself, identify the most recent version of the standard(s) with which it is fully compliant.
It does not work like that.
To start with browsers have to implement many standards that are independent of each other and churn out new versions at their own pace: HTML, CSS, Javascript, image formats, network protocols, ...
Next: each of these new standards 'version' come up with many new features or varying difficulty. Eg look at Javascript. Should the browser wait until they are all implemented before making a new release ? No: they will come out with them as they are ready.
It is much more complicated than meets the eye.
Trouble is which version of the standards ... 'the standard' is not so meaningful in a world where they are continually evolving and browsers implement features in different orders over time. See https://caniuse.com/
Listing all of the features supported (maybe partially) is hard as there are so many of them. So, if you are at the bleeding edge browser+version+browscap-database might be what you have to do -- or resort to javascript magic.
Screen/viewport size ... should not be needed, CSS can handle that.
If the browser lies: well, in theory, if things go wrong the will blame the browser - in practice the user will blame the web site.
which should be one of the ICO's aims, should they not have insisted that Marriott be audited by an independent White Hat type organisation for 10 years ? Hopefully the WH types would kick up a fuss at poor/sloppy practice and make them fix it.
I do not know if the ICO has the power to order this, if not then time to get a quick bill through parliament.
These privacy policies are obscure by design and so long that most give up reading them - the companies that have them do not want people to understand them.
There needs to be an agreement written to be easy to read and given aka kite mark which shows that it is reasonable, fair, etc. There should be several varients to cover different sorts of relationship and be capable of having a schedule attachment to cover things like "how many days to deliver", "postage", etc.
Is that not what the typical Brit does when in Costa del something ? It usually seems to work; but the words for wine & beer are usually well understood.
Oh, wait: we are talking about non English speakers ... so, these people know that volume in not a key to universal understanding - apologies!
Can anyone enlighten me as to why NASA would send an 880 kg space craft on a 7 year mission and only bring back 2.1 oz ? Would it really make much difference to the machine to have a bigger suitcase and so be able to give a sample to more labs when it gets back ?
Maybe take samples from different places on Bennu.
I was going to add "get damages from the patent troll". A great idea, but it would mean that a large, well funded corporate with expensive lawyers would use the threat of damages as a way of blasting small patent holders into giving them free use of what is patented. It is hard enough as it is for the small guy to get the corporates to play by the rules without giving them another cannon.
I want a stable system. I put a lot of work into getting it just as I want, then get on with other things.
I will have an instance of Fedora running as a virtual machine.
@MacroRodent I did consider Mint (which I run on a laptop) but its installer had problems with me wanting LVM over RAID-1.
Time waste: with 2 x 4TB disks I should have used gpt partitioning & EFI - but naff firmware refused to boot. I know that I got it right as it worked under qemu :-(
I have been running RedHat or Centos since about 1995, currently on CentOS 6 - which is dropping out of support soon. CentOS 8 would have been the natural upgrade but it comes with Gnome 3 - which is, as far as I am concerned, unusable. Mate (AKA Gone 2) is not available, XFCE doesn't quite make it; Fedora - I don't want to have to upgrade every year; so I am installing Debian - Mate is an option.
The traffic analysis was done by Gordon Welchman who also worked at Bletchley Park.
So it is broken from the outset. It should be opt in - ie user data only once the web site has got permission.
I suspect that we will see games played along the lines of "Last week you opted out for purposes x, y, z. This week we are doing a, b, c and you need to opt out of that separately."
This stops "sharing or selling of personal data", it does not stop use of data that has been collated by looking at & collating who does what on many, many web sites.
They will just say "we track everybody so we understand everything about everybody. GPC means that we cannot tell you anything, but we have new services that we can sell you that: do anything on your behalf & so let you do almost anything to anybody. So you will reap benefits of all our tracking of everybody (and we get lots more $$)" ?
If I visit a web site I kind of understand that they will learn something about me from that visit. What I do not want is:
* data from the many web sites that I visit collated to draw up a profile about me.
* the use of spooky/subversive techniques (more that just cookies) to identify me, eg abuse of ETags.
Maybe I do not understand but I think that this is naive and will not be much more effective than DNT ...
is that you need to be able to continue to service the on-going cost. This is especially painful when your income suddenly drops - maybe due to a certain virus. If you have bought the hardware outright then no one can take it away because you stop paying them. OK you do need to pay when something breaks, but that does not need to be who you bought it from (unless you bought a John Deere tractor).
Yes: capex means that you need to be able to stump up the cash when you buy it, this can be especially hard for a new/growing org.
Long may this continue.
I don't know if it will start to deal with some of the evil ones who track us from web site to web site when we have explicitly set Do Not Track in our web browser. It would be nice, but I don't know what legal basis it could use.
for what I use a laptop for: something to take out & about, a bit of web browsing, ssh, libreoffice. It has a small 12.4" screen which makes a nice fit for my rucksack. I assume that I will be able to upgrade the OS to Linux Mint or similar.
My main machine at home is more powerful. El Reg reviewers always assume that everyone needs a lot of grunt, not true.
£550 is a tad expensive for a small machine to use on walkabout, there are others that are cheaper. Finding a small screen is harder.
Just provide the source code and be done with it. Huawei makes its money selling hardware, by opening its code (even if that is just to its large telco customers) it would increase trust that it does not have back doors.
I doubt that their algorithms are vastly better than the competition.
If it does not want to do that then publish the complete hardware specs and customers could install their own firmware ... OK: something would need to be obtained, but once done, and shared with telcos world wide, we could have something robust.
The same should apply for Nokia, Cisco, etc.
The likes of google give themselves judicial like powers and then act in a way that can materially affect people. There is hardly any real oversight in the way that they use these powers, very often the decisions are done so as to cause them as little work as possible.
They have global reach and so should be subject to court decisions in the countries where they are visible.
it would mean that devices for which there are only Windows drivers (Eg strange wifi cards) should cease to be a thing of the past - ie I should have no problems upgrading from MS Windows to Linux when I buy a new laptop.
In reality there will still be some kit (probably from China) that ships with proprietary device drivers for which they refuse to release the source code - completely breaching the GPL and them not caring.
Linus will be pushed out and the job will be done... well part of it.
If he is forced out it will be fascinating to see Linus forking the Linux kernel to keep a free version.
But I doubt that this "MS take over" will happen - there are too many others who depend on the Linux kernel.
Not a Boeing
You will never see that on a flight booking form.
The airline might say "we fly Airbus" or similar but then change a flight due to one of a hundred reasons. What are you going to do when you realise as you board the air plane ? You won't be given a refund if you refuse to get on.
I have read most of the exec summary in the report. A large part of the problem was the watering down of the independence of ARs (Authorized Representatives) who are supposed to be the eyes & ears of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), but many were concerned about their job security if they made negative comments - many being paid by Boeing.
So: governance put in as a result of learning from earlier problems - dismantled to reduce costs and, presumably, as those who understood why the governance was put in had retired.
This reminds me of the watering down of banking regulation put in after the banks wrecking the global economy in the 1920/30s being watered down in 1980s - the "big bang". This allowed the meltdown of 2008 to happen.
I suspect that unchecked corner cutting will be found to be one of the causes of the Grenfell fire.
Search for bonfire of regulations to see that this is still happening.
No: the ! told which was the next machine to send email to via UUCP, the final part was the username. For this to work you needed to know which machines talked to which other machines. At one point I had an A3 sheet above my desk with a world map, 100 odd machine names & lines connecting them.
So your routing path would have looked like: machine1!machine2!jsmith123
... this is the email address that you gave to the mail
or mailx
program.