Posts by nijam

Google says broader right to be forgotten is 'serious assault' on freedom

> But that's why we need judges to decide these things and not ...

... tabloid hysteria? vote-grubbing politicians? knee-jerk legislation?

> It's fine for Google to show that website as result for "la vanguardia 19 January 1998", but they're not allowed to show the same result if you search for "Mario Costeja".

And that is, in every reasonable sense, insane. It is a very dubious interpretation of the law which has - in defiance of any real logic - become a legal precedent.

That's not to say that some things should be forgotten, but a statement from a factual report that has long been available as public knowledge? Hard to see how that can ever be considered anything but censorship.

Donald Trump's tweets: Are they presidential statements or not?

> ...a significant indication that those in charge of a major executive department do no consider the tweets to be in the category of official action or direction...

It's only an indication that they know there's enough doubt, so that they can ignore the ones they disagree with (because they're not official), and implement the ones they do agree with (because they're direct from the awful office).

You, Google. Get in here and explain all this personal data slurping – Missouri AG subpoena

Re: Missouri GDP ~$230B - Google market cap ~$720B.

> buying a ton of politicians will suffice

If you read the article, you'd have spotted that the politician's already been bought, otherwise nothing would be happening.

Audio spy Alexa now has a little pal called Dox

> It means more than you think it means...

Short for "doxy", I expect.

Munich council: To hell with Linux, we're going full Windows in 2020

Re: A modest proposal...

> ...I'm sure everyone here will be happy to consider, is that perhaps Linux is not as good or usable as Windows in an environment consisting mostly of non-technical people

Hmmm, well, seems implausible on the basis of my experience with non-technical people.

Re: "IT issues are normal regardless of operating system"

> None of those things apply to enterprise Windows versions

Oh they do, they really really do.

Re: Outlook

> separate apps might just as well be separate apps

What a shame I can only give a single upvote!

Re: Baffling

> And I'm yet to find anything in Windows or 'nux that touches it

Frustratingly, Evolution is so so close... but not quite close enough.

> ...only a good alternative to Office 2003

Unlike Office 365?

Re: Nothing to see here...

> Also known as a "fine" .

No, it really wasn't.

Re: Politics has everything to do with it

> ...3rd party analysis showed that it cost ...

That 3rd party being a Microsoft distributor, ISTR.

Re: Politics is nothing to do with it.

> Exchange is more about calendaring and integration

Two comments about that:

1. Exchange calendaring is dire, apparently unable to cope even with switching to or from summertime.

2. You wrote integration, but I take it what is meant is lock-in?

> Don't blame Word for its users not being properly trained in its use.

Wouldn't dream of it. I blame Word for being so badly designed/implemented that users cannot be properly trained in its use.

> I've used Linux on my work laptop/PC/whatever for the best part of two decades now, yet LibreOffice, like OpenOffice before it, is still shite.

I've used Linux (and BSD Unix before it, and AT&T Unix before that, and Bell Labs Unix before) for rather more than two decades now, and Open Office was already superior to MS Office when it first arrived; Libre Office is in turn substantially better. (We routinely had to use OpenOffice to repair Word documents that couldn't be read by Word, for example.)

> I suspect the issue is it's based on Java.

No, not all that much now.

> it was started by Sun

no, not right either.

Re: Hardly a shock.

> They couldn't make things work (within the budget, or at all).

Mostly because the Windows experts they employed as consultants told them it wasn't possible, or at least cost effective, as I recall.

Re: "When it's political, technology cannot do anything."

> ... licensing advantages of Windows 10 Enterprise ...

Because the GNU license is so difficult to manage?

I sense another self-fulfilling prophecy...

Re: StargateSg7 / Not sure about Office

> With Windows, it's easy to get going

Who the f*** told you that?

Re: Not sure about Office?

> Well that is what they would actually need to use in 99% of workplaces!

And that is the very exemplar of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

(Or would be, if it were actually true.)

US government seizes Texas gun mass murder to demand backdoors

Re: Gun Control you say?

> You can't just make a law to ban guns because of the 2nd Amendment

Yes you can, because a lone psycho killing people in the local church does not constitute a "properly regulated militia".

How do you like them Apples? Farewell sensible sized phones, forever

Re: B-b-b-b-but

> "invented them obviously."

Inventing things obviously? Presumably means copying a competitor's design ...

Re: Non smart phone

> It does need contact and calendar sync to Outlook though.

Well, that certainly wouldn't be considered smart.

Re: I like

> I'd be quite happy with an even smaller phone (maybe a clamshell design)

So how about someone makes a clamshell case for the SE where the cover opens up to be a magnifying glass. A bit like the line testers shown on WIkipedia's "Loupe" page.

Oh well, thought not.

Brit moron tried buying a car bomb on dark web, posted it to his address. Now he's screwed

Re: er...

> It's a dangerous word to use if you're not into rigorous thinking

Well, I'd say it's a dangerous word to omit if you're not into rigorous thinking.

Logitech: We're gonna brick your Harmony Link gizmos next year

Given that this is a deliberate haqk that has not been requested or authorised by the owner/user, how come it doesn't fall under the Computer Misuse Act?

Parity calamity! Wallet code bug destroys $280m in Ethereum

Re: How many DevOps are we talking about here

> For instance, why is the 2nd person always plural in modern English?

It isn't. It's just that the singular and plural forms are spelt and pronounced identically. As with so many other examples in the language, that doesn't mean they're the same word.

Re: This is when I know I'm getting old...

> 5.25" floppy disk

I thought they used to be 8"?

(OK, cue a flood of yet older technologies from commentards.)

Splitting off Google Shopping wouldn't fix the pay-to-play problem

Re: Elephant in the room ?

Price comparison search sites are notorious for concealing which of the suppliers being compared actually owns the site. Many suppliers won't let comparison sites access their data, which is a bad sign about both parties, in my view.

So monetise away, they're only ever going to be of marginal interest to me.

Lord of the Rings TV show shopped around Hollywood

> the scouring of The Shire

I believe it's now called "the draining of The Swamp".

US judge orders Sci-Hub be excised from the internet

> Different side of the pond, different laws.

> Your ruling means nothing over here.

Until someone draws our government's attention to it.

Re: Sanity check

> ... not responsible about the science they put out ...

They also engage in the pernicious practice of bundling subscriptions. E.g. a University Library wants a journal subscription to something such as a highly-regarded astrophysics journal, and find that they also have to pay for half a dozen less "relevant" (OK, I mean "reputable") titles like "Marxist Farmer's Studies" or "Homeopathy-Based Methods in Tax Avoidance". (Sorry, made those up... at least, I hope I did. But the point stands.)

Paradise Papers were not an inside job, says leaky offshore law firm

> It stinks of a cover up.

Or of people being framed.

IBM kills Bluemix, a year after killing SoftLayer

> ... the sun rising behind it, to suggest a new dawn ...

the sun rising behind it, to suggest the cloud being burned off.

So, tell us again how tech giants are more important than US govt...

> "I wish your CEOs were here. They need to answer for this." "I'm disappointed that you're here and not your CEOs."

Presumably, the natural response would be "Funny, I was thinking much the same about you."

Guess who's now automating small-biz IT jobs? Yes, it's Microsoft

> What happens when the PHB who's running it locks himself out?

Further damage is avoided.

IBM offloads Notes and Domino to India's HCL Technologies

Re: Last time I used Notes

> You could've just hit insert to toggle the unread marks

D'oh! That's so obvious! How could anyone overlook it?

</sarcasm>

Insert. What were they thinking?

Or should I say "What? Were they thinking?"

Re: Aw come on - give Notes a break

> If its past is ignored and you take a look at what it is now, it's pretty impressive.

The Notes expert on our team (who has to maintain some legacy stuff) says things like that too. I don't believe him either.

Re: Interface Hall of Shame

> heavyweight global all-singing all-dancing application, and ... used it as a customisable off-the-shelf alternative to bespoke.

Like many all-singing all-dancing applications, it requires so much customisation work to achieve usability that writing a bespoke system would be easier and more maintainable.

EU law bods closer to baking new 'cookie law' after battle

> ...they made every internet site annoying overnight...

No, that was website owners, who could have used a much simpler method, namely, nor having the unnecessary cookies in the first place. In most cases, the irritating buttons were only there as part of the campaign to make the law look stupid.

(Like my employers, for example, who insisted all our websites added the cookie banner and button... even sites that didn't use cookies at all.)

BT agrees to cream off less profit from landline-only customers

Next, an equivalent reduction for broadband-only customers who don't want a landline phone service.

No? Thought not.

Dell forgot to renew PC data recovery domain, so a squatter bought it

Re: How do domain names expire?

> ...it should always go to [e-mail]..

...which simply redirects to "[e-mail]" and hasn't been updated because "[e-mail]" redirects to "[e-mail]".

Obviously.

> Nothing wrong with working in the shadows

Much better than trying to work with the black hole of IT, in my experience.

>...Dell confirmed it lost control of the domain to The Register...

Surely not! Perhaps you mean "...Dell confirmed to The Register ..." But well done if your original phrasing was more appropriate.

Oracle ZFS man calls for Big Red to let filesystem upstream into Linux

If they'd simply made that oh-so-slight change to the license so that it was GPL-compatible, it would have been both (a) available in Linux very quickly thereafter, and (b) supported in Linux (probably better than it is supported by Oracle).

Not going to happen, though, as other commentards have already pointed out.

Ubuntu 17.10: We're coming GNOME! Plenty that's Artful in Aardvark, with a few Wayland wails

> A lot of companies would never have admitted that the vision of convergence wasn't what people wanted.

And Canonical were only 5 years later than they should have been. The only thing that made the otherwise-awful Unity seem acceptable was that Gnome switched to the possibly-even-worse Gnome Shell at about the same time. Wayland has promise, but Mir never did. All of this was apparent at the time.

Google faces $10k-a-day fines if it defies court order to hand over folks' private overseas email

Re: Why not make it a fair bet ...

> Just that the "trying to pull a fast one" conclusion does not follow.

Yes, I think it does. It is implicitly impossible for a government agency to make an honest mistake.

GE goes with Apple: Not the Transformation you were looking for, Satya?

Re: And why should that surprise us?

> The gist of the article is old news for us

And here. About 15 years we assessed TCO of WIndows+PC as roughly triple that of Mac.

Re: ArrrrrG!!!

> ... just too old and stuck in my ways.

Like DLNA itself, then.

Didn't install a safety-critical driverless car patch? Bye, insurance!

Re: Customers won't do it

"Autonomous cars will need to apply borks (patches) automatically"

FTFY

Re: Safety Critical Patches

> Finding the bugs in this case is easy - they're on the windscreen

One the inside of the windscreen, in serious cases.