Posts by nijam

Return-to-office mandates boost company profits? Nope

> ... when managers can't see their staff they can't be certain of the work rate ...

When staff can't see their managers, they can be absolutely certain of the work rate.

'I’m sorry for everything...' Facebook's Zuck apologizes to families at Senate hearing

Sadly, contemptible as Zuckerberg and his ilk are, it's clear that politicians are no better.

UK water giant admits attackers broke into system as gang holds it to ransom

> ... making off with a "limited amount of data."

Would that limit be "the total amount of data that Southern Water have"?

Perfect timing... US Navy throws Boeing $103M to update its sub recon jets

Presumably fitting the optional "automated override of pilot instructions" and "in-flight test of evacuation system" options, so sadly lacking from the utilitarian feature set of military jets.

Could immutability be a Leap too far for openSUSE users?

Re: re: A read-only root file system makes the OS much more resilient against disk corruption,

> ...a read only FS will not protect you.

No, but it might make it much more difficult to fix.

Disease X fever infects Davos: WEF to plan response to whatever big pandemic is next

Re: Obligatory masks when coughing

> There is irrefutable scientific and practical evidence that masks work.

There is also, admittedly less well-publicised, irrefutable scientific and practical evidence that masks don't have a significant effect.

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

Re: consuming no more than 1,977 calories a day

> ... community very, very unhappy

Doesn't everything?

Re: Why buses?

> ... I rarely exceed two fatalities...

You must have good genetics.

Open source's new mission: To boldly go where no software has gone before

Re: Only for a specific type of open source, and only from a certain viewpoint

> Commercial software in general absolutely attempts to provide for the users' needs

Only if by "user" you mean the intersection of the set of PHBs and the set of procurement executuves. The skills of "commercial software" suppliers lies primarily in exploiting the weaknesses of that subset.

Windows keyboards to get a Copilot key – but how quickly will users jump?

> Still haven't figured out the difference between a program and an application.

Having grown up in a family of medics, I can tell you that an application is a cream or ointment (usually having an upleasant colour or texture) applied topically.

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Re: Algol-68

> "This statement requires nine run-time checks."

True in other languages besides Algol-68, so your reaction was a little unfair.

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

Based on every other commercial broadcast or steaming service, there are a number of safe predictions:

* The adverts will be shit and will annoy viewers.

* The products advertised will be shit and will go on my blacklist of suppliers to avoid.

* I'm likely to turn off and do something else.

Re: Amazon killing the golden goose.

> If you buy something from their marketplace and it fails after 30 days then you are reliant on the goodwill of the 3rd party supplier.

Why is that a surprise, or any different to buying anything else online? You're buying from the third party, not Amazon, and the Amazon product page makes that clear.

Re: Prime

> ... the morons running Sainsburys bought them out for £1.4bn

... to save Argos from bankruptcy, as I recall. But still moronic, Argos still sells useless tat, and Sainsbury's are stuck with it now.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Re: Instant Mutability of Software Systems

Of course we have "instant mutability of software systems" more-or-less everywhere now. It's better know as malware, but hey...

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

> ... If windows 12 is subscription based for AI, that feature is NOT going to be popular.

Actually, that's better than just forcing it on everybody. No subscription, no AI. Though the AI hype largely fails to mention that it's really just Artificial Stupidity.

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

Re: Permanent status quo

> ... not being pushed by one side of the political spectrum.

You're looking at the "spectrum" from the wrong direction. The "sides" here are, on the one hand governments, and on the other everyone else.

So yes, definitely being pushed by one of those sides.

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

Re: Lychford Road

> As for the smartmeters...

Like most gadgets marketed with the word "smart", they're smart only in comparision to the people whose choose to buy/specify/madate them.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Re: As an alternative to propane?

> Could I (and people like me) be a useful test case for ...

Yes, absolutely. So it's guaranteed you'll never be asked.

Re: Hydrogen is absolute SHIT for energy storage or transfer

> Houses are a lot more leak tight ...

It's the pipework, not the houses, that need to be leak-tight. Of course.

Re: I have to wonder

> Politics, Philosophy & Economics

i.e. Opinions.

Re: Well, duh

> ...submerging the eastern seabord of the USA ...

Are there any benefits besides that?

Damn, even the Pope thinks AI and autonomous weapons need reining in

> ... even the Pope thinks AI and autonomous weapons need reining in.

Only because has not got any of his own yet.

Science fiction writers imagine a future in which AI doesn’t abuse copyright – or their generosity

Nothing new...

The worst abuse of copyright happened long ago, when it was extended beyond 20 years.

Linux Kernel of the Beast 6.6.6 exorcised by angelic 6.6.7 update

Re: Alltogether now...

As an archer, I would expect the neighbour to be either 664 or 665 (depending on whether you are using 5 or 10 zone scoring); scores are always written in descending order.

Either way, not a particularly good score.

Just saying.

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

Re: Everyone Hates systemd

> ... “systemd knew its audience. It provided a free and maintained service that was better and more modern than its predecessors. This made it a no-brainer for many Linux distributions to make the switch.”

But it isn't maintained, it's forever having cruft added, perhaps becuase that's easier than writing good (or even adequate) documentation. It is more modern, but better? No evidence for that, I think. A no brainer indeed, if we're discussing the author ("designer"? No evidence for that either).

Re: /usr

> `/usr/` means "users" and home directories lived there 'til they ran out of disk space.

Precisely. So the new plan of putting everything into /usr then cluttering the root disk with symlinks to something in /usr is exactly the opposite of what should have been done.

Openreach hits halfway mark in quest to hook up 25M premises with fiber broadband

How many of those 25m premises already have fibre courtesy (e.g.) City Fibre? (As we do at this location.) As a follow-up, why are they duplicating fibre connectivity when there is still much of the country as yet untouched?

Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP

Re: Many years ago....

> ... I wonder what happened to it?

It broke.

You can't deepfake diversity, and that's a good thing

> ...they'll get pretty angry for good reason.

Presumably your point is that "a good reason" isn't simply that they've been found out?

Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org

Re: Therefore Wayland is just not an option for me until that is fixed.

> ... all the issues and the lack of features should have been ironed out by now.

By now? No, by 10 years ago.

Re: Wayland itself is getting old now...

> What's the betting that someone starts developing a replacement for Wayland sometime soon?

Fairly high probability. Can we hang on to X11 until the Wayland replacement is ready?

Videoconferencing fatigue is real, study finds

The study was presumably funded by a consortium of PHBs.

FFmpeg 6.1 drops a Heaviside dose of codec magic

As a physicist, Heaviside is reputed to have said "the only good result of mathematics is being able to do without it". OTOH, nowadays physics is almost entirely a branch of mathematics, plus some very expensive lab equipment to test the mathematics.

Net privacy wars will be with us always. Let's set some rules

Re: How to weigh the equities?

> One is intentionally evil and wants to exploit the breach of your privacy for profit.

The other is intentionally evil and wants to exploit the breach of your privacy for power.

48-nation bloc to crack down on using crypto assets to avoid tax

Re: Four years!

> Why not just ban it all right now?

Ban tax? Absolutely!

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

I had a colleague who always wanted particular specifications of equipment so as to be "future-proof". But he seemed to have misunderstood it, perhaps by analogy with "water-proof".

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

> ...desk was right below the fire alarm bell ...

Well, that's a H&S issue straight away, unless he's been issued with earplugs.

Reminds me that I once work at an organisation that tested the fire alarms weekly by slackening off the screws on a cover of the " in case of fire, break glass" units. Yes, you guessed... the threads eventually wore away. Tested to destruction, I believe the phrase is.

Come work at HQ... or find a new job, Roblox CEO tells staff

> ...Roblox is an innovation company and we needed to get back ...

Excellent quote.

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Re: Application abuse

> It’s a sophisticated tool...

And there is the problem. It's a spreadsheet, doing sophisticated things with it is pretty well guaranteed to be wrong.

Go ahead, let the unknowable security risks of Windows Copilot onto your PC fleet

Re: That's one way of looking at it

> "What happens when your OS vendor becomes an adversary?"

Windows users have decade of experience in answeing that eqnquiry.

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

Re: not happening

> These are the people you have to deal with in enterprise environments.

These are the kind of people who would only be tolerated in an enterprise environment, for that matter. Same as the shitty software that insist on buying, in that regard.

Re: Windows 11 itself is not much of a carrot

> there are some technical merits to Windows

That's a claim I've never heard before. Lots of other reasons (albeit rarely as strong as they believe) that people buy it, but not technical merit.

Re: I'm sure AI has some use somewhere .....

Well, a cattle farmer may have something to say on the subject.

But as for what's being tirelessly touted in the IT press nowadays, it's the same story as before - artificial stipidity rather than artificial intellegence.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: Moving House

> Nobody can stop me watching a DVD I physically own.

Unless a new decoder thingy gets downloaded to your player. It's certainly happened already from from time to time.

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

> "spend more meaningful time together."

I think that should read "spend more less-meaningful time together."

UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program

Re: "it wanted to pursue a domestic fusion energy strategy"

> Do you believe there is only one possible way to achieve fusion?

No. In terms of technologically and economically viable methods, I believe there are none.

> Britain has performed far, far better ...

Britain has performed slightly better ...

And it's still only an estimate.

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

Re: About those bad guys......

> Scanning is fundamentally incompatible with end-to-end encrypted messaging apps.

Scanning is fundamentally incompatible with security.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Easy win but challenging keep.

> This looked like the win was easy for Oracle

It was an easy win. All they had to do was get the council so sign the contract.