Posts by ovation1357

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Re: Efficient interface

Urgh! Nano!

Long time vi / vim user here... Am I alone in hating nano and hating even more when systems have EDITOR set to nano.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

Wow! That's a pretty damning list of issues and I find them entirely believable based on other bad encounters with the zealotry pouring out of the Wayland/GNOME teams.

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Re: SMS

Except that a number of cards now print the "secret" CVV on the same face as the card number and expiry date.

I don't get it: However tenuous/weak the CVV may be, it does still add a layer of protection e.g. one "attack" might be obtaining a photo of the card so having the code on the back slightly reduces the risk of this being useable.

I'd love to know why some banks have decided it's okay to do this.

Oracle Cloud says it's not true someone broke into its login servers and stole data

Re: Encrypted passwords?

"Even with salting, it makes cracking expensive but not impossible"

This blows my mind! Unless there's some known weakness in the salt and/or the hash then the only way to crack this is to brute force it by generating hashes of what, billions? trillions? of possible combinations using the salt which is (or at least should be) unique to that individual password.

Please correct me if I'm missing something here. I'm struggling to comprehend a scenario where the amount of time and computation would be worth it.

Encrypted passwords?

"The SSO passwords are encrypted, they can be decrypted with the available files,"

Why on earth are passwords being encrypted rather than hashed?

I've only seen this in really poor, old (like 20 years old) software.

People are creatures of habit and there's every chance that a chunk of users are using the same password elsewhere :-|

China's EV champ BYD reveals super-fast charging that leaves Tesla eating dust

Re: Recharging = needed break anyway?

I'm happy you rolled with 7kw - I used it as the notional best rate you'll get on a single phase charger... I believe 3-phase can go up to about 22kw BUT I'm not sure how many cars are compatible with it... My old Citroen e-C4 certainly only supported single phase :-|

In my opinion multiple phases in a grazing setup would be better used to support more single phase chargers.

Re: Recharging = needed break anyway?

I acknowledge that the cumulative cost will be greater although I question whether you'd really need as much as 50% coverage - there's a lot of EVs on the road these days, I've no idea of the percentage but the few hotels I've been to have had between 0 and 2 chargers and those which had chargers generally didn't seem to have much contention.

I'm sure the demand will increase but not every EV is going to need charging - e.g. I occasionally have to travel about 100 miles away for work and I choose to stay in a hotel when I work late. With my current EV I easily have enough range to drive the return journey plus local running around without needing to charge.

Assuming the charging isn't free and assuming it is more expensive than at home, I wouldn't use the hotel's chargers even if it had them. I can't be alone in this situation.

There's already standard technology to dynamically limit the rate of 7kw chargers so I'm sure there's also scope for a fair degree of "over commitment" - e.g. loads of 7kw chargers safely running off a supply which is smaller than the sum of them. Not all cars will need the same amount of charging nor will the pull the same current so over a longer, slower "graze" everybody can get sufficiently "fed".

Re: Recharging = needed break anyway?

I don't know about "allowed" - manufacturers seem to have stopped shipping them at standard but I think that's more because they're deemed too slow to be useful.

I don't have one and there are a tiny number of times when it would be of use to me. I keep toying with the idea of getting one but they are quite expensive and mine would likely sit unused for 364 days of the year

Re: Fast charging

I was that guy once or twice, although never knowingly with a queue of people waiting... Quite simply, my previous EV could only manage a measley 120 motorway miles from 100% so charging to 80% (~96 miles) simply didn't yield enough range on a long journey.

It was rare that the 80% was achieved in 30 mins too - anything from 40 to 60 mins was more normal. And then the final 20% was more like an extra 20-30 mins so not all that bad if it meant not having to stop and mess about with yet another charger.

In my experience it takes an absolute minimum of 10 mins just to come off the road and stop somewhere very briefly.

Then on average it probably takes 10 mins to get the charger to interface with the car and actually start charging. This bit is hugely variable and it's taken me as long as 40 minutes (in the pissing rain) to successfully pay and start charging - thankfully some other chargers take mere seconds to set up but it's a lottery right now.

So when an extra 20-30 mins gets enough charge to reach the destination Vs another 40+ mins stop later on seems a better bet to me.

Fortunately my current EV has a great range and 80% (~180 miles) will be more likely to cut it on most journeys. I also haven't needed a rapid charger since getting a long range car so I've never tested how quickly it charges but it supports 150kw charging so in theory should get to 80% even quicker than the previous car.

Re: Recharging = needed break anyway?

"Charging (or refueling) points are expensive to install" :

In the case of rapid chargers, yes - they cost a fortune (I believe you're talking about £80k+ for ultra rapid). But for single-phase 7kW AC chargers the cost is a fraction of that. One can easily get a basic charger installed for under £1000 (and I think the charger units themselves are way overpriced for what they are) - certainly in my case even consistent access to a regular 13amp socket to use a so-called granny charger would have taken the edge off in most of my own cases. I'm sure the government could easily offer grants and incentives to business across the country to try and achieve basic charging facilities installed in the majority of public and private car parks.

One of the many problems with the public charging infrastructure is the extortionate prices they charge. e.g. At home I'm fortunate enough to have a driveway and a 'smart' home charger so I can charge for about 7p/kWh vs anything from around 43p on Tesla's network up to about 89p with the worst offenders (here's looking at you, InstaVolt and PotPoint!). Don't even get me started about 'fragmentation', shitty apps, incompatibility etc.

Rapid chargers are serious machines - liquid cooled cables delivering hundreds of volts DC at insane currents - they cost a bomb and then you have to deal with the latest craze of ne'er-do-well metal thieves chopping off the cables. I have to assume that a large part of the exorbitant price of charging is due to the exorbitant cost of installing and maintaining the chargers - i.e. rapid charging might always be a rip-off and not necessarily because of profiteering but because of the massive overhead costs of running them.

I think the long-term solution is two-fold:

Firstly:

EVs need to have sufficient range for their purpose. Tiny EVs marketed for inner city use can get away with a tiny battery whilst family/business EVs should (entirely in my opinion) have enough range to be able to handle 99% of regular journeys without needing a rapid charger.

My own yard stick is: My EV needs to be able to cover a minimum distance of 200 motorway miles driving at <u>the legal speed limit</u> in winter conditions. (N.B. it is quite common for EV drivers to brag about how they achieved a better range by driving at 50mph on the motorway. For me this is a deal-breaker.)

I had a Citroen e-C4 for three years with a 45kW battery and an advertised range of over 200miles. In reality when driving on the motorway I could not risk driving more than 120miles before needing to charge and this turned a ~400 mile journey to Cornwall with my kids (and a 400 mile return) into a "never again!" moment. The lack of charging infrastructure in Cornwall at the time compounded the misery. This was certainly a time when a even a humble granny charger would have made an improvement to the experience.

Now I've got a Polestar 2 which is an order of magnitude better than the Citroen on all counts, but the really crucial difference is that it is a long-range model with an 82kW battery - close to double that of the Citroen. This is a game changer for me - I can easily do a 200 mile round-trip from fully charged driving normally, using heated seats and A/C etc, and still get home with another 80+ miles of range remaining. In 4 months of ownership (well, 'lease-er-ship') I haven't needed to use a public charger once and don't envisage needing one any time soon.

Secondly: "Graze Charging" - Almost every time I have needed to use a rapid charger, my car has been parked for multiple hours with no access to power and could have easily been topped up enough to avoid the need to make a detour and delay my driving time at a rapid charge point.

As per my initial point about the cost of chargers, I'm convinced that if some ~7kW chargers were available at the majority of car parks (and ideally half the price per kWh or better compared to rapid chargers) then the demand for rapid chargers would fall drastically and we'd all be a bit less obsessed with trying to push a huge amount of power into a battery in the shortest possible time.

Back on the topic of BYD - My gut feeling is that this new breakthrough, if it's viable, it likely to be even more costly than the current rapid charging options. I did look at BYD's cars when choosing my latest EV but the reviews were not particularly good and given they were similarly priced to the bigger names in the market there was nothing to inspire me to look at one this time round.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: GTK3!? Oh no!

Wow, this is great news, thank you.

Let the GIMP project be a shining example to all other GTK application developers of providing user choice! :-)

GTK3!? Oh no!

The screenshot in the article appears to be on a Mac but if looks dangerously like there is no menu bar...

Somebody please tell me they haven't caved in and moved random buttons into the title bar along with a hamburger menu on the Linux version?

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

Let's see....

I've always refused to have any of these devices in my house on two counts: Firstly major privacy concerns, secondly; they are really annoying. It's really hard to disable on a phone as well - no single on/off setting... There is one exception where I occasionally use Google Assistant and that is: in my car...

My previous car had Android Auto which was exceedingly disappointing: The primary function I used it for was to play my kids' random song requests whilst driving.

But it would often go like this:

ME: 'Play Baby Shark'

ASSISTANT: 'You need to set up Youtube Music'

ME: 'Ask Spotify to play baby shark'

ASSISTANT: 'Ok, asking Spotify to play Raining Blood by Slayer'

I can't remember which songs we actually involved but this exact scenario arose more than once. At least the kids found it hilarious!

Sometimes the default song would be the wrong one, so you can say 'Ask Spotify to search for the birdie song' but then you need to use the touch screen to chose which version you actually want.

My latest car is built on Android Automotive (AAOS) which is similar but different to Android Auto (Seriously, who passed these product names through Marketing!?!?) and the assistant on that is a step worse.

ME: 'Ask Spotify to play Baby Shark'

ASSISTANT: 'Sorry, I didn't understand that'

ME: 'Play baby shark'

ASSISTANT: 'You need to set up YouTube Music...'

ME: 'Open Spotify'

ASSISTANT: 'Opening Spotify'

But now the only way I can find to voice search in Spotify is to interact with the touch screen to press the search icon and then press the 'Speech to text' button. Given this is all on a touch screen it requires me to divert my attention from the road to achieve this :-(

At one point one of my children really got into a French band called 'Kids United' and would ask me to play things like 'On Ecrit Sur Les Murs' - It's safe to say that Google Assistant cannot handle non-English words when set to English. I'd hazard a guess this means that you're a bit stuffed if you drive your car onto the continent unless you want to go the whole hog and talk to your device in the local language as well.

So if Gemini can handle these tasks then it will be a step forward.

However, the whole voice interface needs to get a whole load better to be genuinely useful - For starters I do not need it to repeat back to me everything I've asked it to do. It would also help if it were less disruptive - i.e. when a song is playing I can't queue up another one without it pausing the one being played. Ideally I'd be able to just say "Play agadoo next" and it would add it to the queue silently and without interrupting Baby Shark.

Likewise I can now fairly reliably press the mic button on my steering wheel and say "navigate to Westward Ho!" but when there are multiple route options and I want to select the one which is only 5 mins slower but 20 miles shorter, if there's a way to do this verbally I haven't figured it out yet so it's back to interacting with the touch screen again (Side rant: I hate touchscreens and they are nothing short of dangerous in cars. Bring back physical buttons!).

So let's see what Gemini brings. If I can control all the bells and whistles of my car by talking to it in plain English then in spite of my general AI/LLM scepticism I might be persuaded to use it,

Fresh Wine-flavored version of Mono released

Re: Web apps

"especially now Internet Explorer is retired"

And now you just get all the fun of dealing with all the Safari users instead!

Okay: Safari is not as bad as IE but it has caused me very significant pain on a few occasions due to its nonstandard behaviour - stuff that works fine in Firefox and Chromium based browsers but not in Safari.

I wouldn't mind so much but Safari is only available on macOS/IOS devices and therefore requires developers to purchase expensive Apple kit to be able to test it!

Satya Nadella says AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel

Re: Two bad examples

This is exactly the point I was going to make!

Excel's position as a "killer app" is more like being the lowest common denominator. It's flexible enough to let non technical people do practically anything they wish and I'd argue that this often harms "productivity"

For example I'll be asked to take an arbitrary list of tasks or goals written in Excel by a project manager, and manually add related ticket numbers (e.g. JIRA) and their status. It's then expected that these statuses be manually synchronised periodically with the real tickets. It's pointless and stupid but the powers that be don't see anything wrong with it.

Got a list of project issues? Excel

Want to manage a list of hardware assets? Excel

Want to draw a crude block diagram? Excel

List of team members/contacts? Excel

Heck a friend of mine who's a true power user and did national statistics for a living, ended up making a garden plan in Excel because it was just the tool he knows best!

In my own work environment Excel + OneDrive can't even handle the most basic synchronisation as still doesn't seem to support any kind of collaborative editing...

Create a new excel file and save it. Immediately there's a warning that the Server version of the file has changed and would I like to keep my version or the server version!?!?! It's a new file for Christ's sake!

And then people decide to send spreadsheets to multiple people by email for editing so then you end up with multiple edited forks of the original file. In some cases the owner of the file will then spend hours copying and pasting bits from the various edits into the master version...

It's a hideous mess and I can only hope the the "killer" AI / AGI / LLM application is something significant better and more meaningful than email spam and crappy "creative" uses of Excel.

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Re: I can feel the downvotes coming! Be gentle.

"It's nice to have choice on Linux"

I completely agree and I'd very much like the choice for modern GNOME to stop shitting all over my MATE desktop.

I personally find GNOME to be unusable - it's a frustrating and horrible experience for me but I'm perfectly happy to accept that it works brilliantly for others.

However they've taken a very deliberate decision to remove all backward compatibility with traditional UI concepts in favour of their own mobile/touch-centric interface which means that a significant number of other desktops now have a bunch of applications which do not obey the theme of the desktop and have hamburger menus and all that other nastiness.

Unfortunately this pretty much shatters the illusion of choice and even XFCE has caved in and gone down the Wayland and Hamburger Menu path.

Re: So long since

It's still very much the latter:-(

2 officers bailed as anti-corruption unit probes data payouts to N Irish cops

Am I alone in really hoping that the head of anti corruption used the term "Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee Donkey" during their investigation?

It's the perfect setting! :-D

'Abandoned' astro takes recordbreaking ninth spacewalk

Astros?

Since when has the word astronaut been abbreviated to 'astro'? I hate to be the language snob here but it this really grates with me. Am I alone?

Otherwise a very interesting story though :-D

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: You may be preaching to

You're having a laugh MATE ;-)

Xfce 4.20 is out: Wayland support lands, but some pieces are still missing

> There are new toolbar buttons and the option

> of GNOME-style "Client Side Decorations"

No, No, NO! Stop it now!

GNOME 3 is a horrible, retrograde step and these UI horrors such as "hamburger" menus and other buttons embedded into massive Title bars need to be vigorously opposed in other desktops and GTK3+ applications.

This kind of UI might be great on a touchscreen device but it's horrific for mouse+keyboard users and allowing it to become the norm on non-gnome desktops is a really bad thing (sadly the rot began quite a few years ago and is now almost impossible to reverse).

If XFCE wants to drink the so-called Kool Aid of Wayland and include compatibility with it then so be it, but even in the X11 versions they've already accepted hamburger menus and CSDs which is a huge letdown to their core user base, who I believe are mainly power users who want a functional and stable DE without gimmicks and with long-term stable UI standards.

I'm a MATE user myself as I find XFCE a little too minimal for my needs but I'm in the same boat with many of the utilities and core software introducing weird touch-centric UI changes which aren't optional or configurable. It really sucks right now.

Re: Meh

Exactly. What we get now is, frankly, awful. I don't really care what the GNOME 3 / Shell desktop environment does in its own bubble, but I'm furious that they're leaking nasty UI changes which break most other desktops.

Re: Meh

When you say "the menu bar belongs at the top of the screen", if you mean like it is/was in macOS then I'm going to politely and very strongly disagree with you because each window should have its own menu bar and not just one bar which switches context based on the window in focus (which might be a very long way away from the top of the screen and thus a big chore for a mouse user).

However I'm a big advocate of user choice and I'll defend your right to have it the way you prefer so long as it's customisable and I can still have my menus where I want them.

This is the killer problem with GNOME and Wayland's ecosystem: All choice is being squeezed out and their interpretation of The One True Interface is being slowly forced onto everybody.

In my world CSDs are a terrible thing and buttons embedded in title bars are an abomination - I could live with them being an option but now they're irrevocably baked into a lot of core libraries and utilities used across all distros and have ruined the UI in great desktops like XDFC and MATE

Re: Still?

Absolutely 100% spot on! I really wish Red Hat would kindly disappear up its own arse and stop letting a bunch of arrogant babies screw up everybody else's desktop because they think their way is superior.

Developer pockets $2M in savings from going cloud-free

Can anyone share any outstanding examples of great support from their cloud vendor when the "someone else's computer" bit went wrong and it was fixed quickly and competently?

Genuine question because my own experience is that it can sometimes take days to reach anybody with real technical knowledge (and this is via a large corporate contract). You can colour me cynical but I'm mighty weary of the marketing promises about what the cloud can actually do.

It seems to me that non-technical executives take great comfort in believing they've outsourced responsibly to cloud vendors only to find that when the proverbial hits the fan, they'll be harassing the poor onsite team who will have little to no option but to wait however long the cloud vendor takes to fix it as they have no control over it.

UK electronics firms want government to stop taxing trash and let them fix it instead

I think it would be immensely helpful if the Draconian rules at "recycling centres" could be reviewed and improved.

It's not just the whole issue of right to repair, modular vs component level replacements (the former typically being an expensive part with minimal labour time vs a potentially very cheap part but more labour time spent to diagnose and fix) and generally the interplay of warranties vs what is considered to be 'economical repair'...

When I was a kid, you could go to the local tip and give them a few quid for just about anything they had there.

These days, once any electronic item has been left there, removal of that item is completely forbidden and they'll cite all sorts of rules as to why this is so.

The trouble is that a lot of decent stuff gets thrown away!

Sometimes it's fully working, sometimes a minor and easily repairable fault or perhaps it's beyond repair but contains really useful/rare spare parts... It might be a really valuable item or something of historical importance. Once it's at the tip it seems it would be irrevocably committed to be destroyed.

So far as I can tell there are no exceptions now - members of the public may not take nor buy these items and I believe that the 'recyclers' often won't care about anything other than the raw materials.

If we're really going to crack the problem of e-waste we need to come at it from all angles. Force the manufacturers to provide technical documentation and supply parts at a reasonable cost. Force the likes of Apple to unlock their obsolete hardware (e.g. iPad/iPod/iPhones becoming bricks merely because they're no longer supported and locked to prevent any alternative use). Force them to build products which are designed to last and to be repaired. And force the local authorities to encourage and support those who wish to repair "waste" items in favour of settling the waste to be melted down.

And perhaps most of all, we all need to change our attitudes towards repairing unglamorous, functional devices rather than preferring everything to be shiny and new.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Re: Wait. What?

You can set any date you like on a cert for expiry but there is also a valid from date and the client system can choose to reject it based on any arbitrary length of time :-(

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Re: FreeBSD predates Mac OS X

Luxury!

And if you try and tell the young folks of today...

Re: Lost on who?

I'm not entirely sure one jump straight from colourised output from "ls" to the monolithic beast of "systemd"

Colours used in ls are optional but enabled by default in modern distros using bash or other modern shells. In fact, ls itself does not use colour by default but distributions/shells come with default aliases such as 'ls=ls --color=auto'. Such built-in aliases may not be to everybody's taste but they can easily be changed to suit individual preferences.

Personally, I find it helpful but those who dislike it can disable it, and in the case colour-related visual impairments, the colours are fully customisable ('dircolors' and the LS_COLORS variable), so I'm sure there will continue to be a user choice between no colours or alternative colour schemes.

I hate to point out that FreeBSD offers 'ls -G' for colourised listings when using a compatible terminal, which can be set up as an alias to make it the default.

I'm also reasonably sure I used colourised ls output on Solaris back in the day.

There are many things to dislike about the state and direction of the Linux ecosystem but does 'ls' including optional support for colour terminals deserve a place on that list?

GNOME head honcho Holly Million steps down

Re: Really?

I personally hate vertical task bars so I've never tried them on MATE.

I never said it was perfect and it's not entirely fair to judge it based on one single feature.

Come to think of it - if you use the mate tweak utility to set it to look and feel like the Unity desktop then I'm sure they has a vertical taskbar.

Anyhow I'm glad there's a selection of DEs available. MATE meets my needs exceedingly well. I have friends who swear by Cinnamon, others XFCE or KDE.

My huge gripe with GNOME is that the fundamental changes it keeps making to the GTK library are removing functionality and/or changing stable behaviours in other desktops and that is unacceptable.

I get that they own GTK but as it underpins a vast amount of software that runs on non-GNOME desktops, they have a duty of care to not trash other people's systems whilst adding whatever they want for their own.

Re: Really?

> MATE being GNOME 2, of course.

MATE being a massive saving grace after GNOME itself decided to throw a stable and mature desktop environment in the bin in order to go chasing after unicorns (or something).

MATE was based on a fork of GNOME 2 but it's continually developing and is a world away from where it started. It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that the two desktops are equal.

Re: Really?

Yep. MATE gets a monthly donation from me.

It's my daily driver and the least I can do is make a monthly donation for the software I rely on so critically.

GNOME on the other hand can go and do one at the moment. Until they change their attitude and stop trying to force everyone to do everything their way like religious crusaders violently converting all who dare to stand in their way, they certainly won't be receiving a penny from me.

Re: Nominative determinism

.. or MATE which is a valiant attempt to keep the GNOME 2 desktop environment alive after the GNOME project stuck two fingers up at all of its users worldwide and dumped GNOME 3 on them in a half-baked, barely usable state accompanied with condescending lectures about how we're all just using it the wrong way because, you know, their way is the best way and the only true way!

I believe they the core MATE developers are based in Germany, so I'm certain that they'd be very deserving of a bit of that cash.

The Canon Cat – remembering the computer that tried to banish mice

Re: A Pebble is Not a Raindrop

I'd argue quite strongly that that current offenders in the UI sphere (although they like to call it UX these days) are all in a race to the bottom right now to see who can paper over the most details.

I'm a huge fan of keyboard-driven applications and there are cases where you still find people using an old mainframe terminal application such as in a car spares department where the operators are lightning fast on the keyboard, no mouse, no graphics; they can find a full list of parts for your vehicle along with stock level and pricing (even location in the warehouse) within a split second of you telling them your registration. The 'modern' equivalent driven by mouse and keyboard is likely to be much slower.

In my world I'm fighting the UI zealots behind the Gnome/Wayland projects. Not that I object to them doing wild and radical things in their UI but because those wild and radical changes are being imposed on users of other UIs, choice is being removed and long-standing features are being removed on the basis that they're old.

We've had a period of relative stability for a couple of decades, where most OSes and applications support doing most things using either the keyboard or the mouse. Now they're all chasing after touch screens and forgetting all the people who prefer keyboards and mice :-(

Rust rustles up fix for 10/10 critical command injection bug on Windows in std lib

It's a misquote from South Park, originally referencing Windows 98.

The point is that even if Rust is hugely safer than C/C++ it's not foolproof. Anyone can write bad and insecure code in any language and my attempt at a joke here was really only aimed at the minority who go too far with evangelising its merits and make claims that may imply that it's some kind of magic bullet.

Yeah, I'm well aware that most people think my 'dad jokes' are rubbish! I agree.

But, but, but... rust is ultra-secure, and faster, with better access to the internet!

Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director

Re: Many of us older commentards here

My mother in law's PC has been running with Linux Mint and Google Chrome for a few years with barely a hiccup but I have to say I'm dismayed at how easy the browser makes it for non technical users to blindly install crappy toolbar extensions and hundreds of push notifications.

Every time I look at it, it reminds me of the bad old days of IE with all the evil ActiveX add-ons and other junk. It's inundated with 'news', games and recipe pop ups, and usually has some kind of fake search engine set at the home page.

Just goes to show that if you have a user who is prone to clicking "Accept" on everything that pops up, then the default security is for all the spam and spyware to walk straight in, even on a non MS system (and it really pains me to say that because MS are the worst by miles).

It's definitely even worse on Windows but Chrome is pretty bad at this and its problems are platform independent

Good news: HMRC offers a Linux version of Basic PAYE Tools. Bad news: It broke

Re: RFQ issued:

Well you say "joke alert"....

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Re: Repeat after me:

Thunderbird is outstandingly good as an email client with 'okay' calendaring - sadly they've been doing various evil things to the user interface of late but I would take it 100 times over outlook or i could persuade them to allow it where i work.

Outlook is nothing short of atrocious - the search is almost nonexistent and I find the UI impossible.

I don't think I'll ever quite understand why some people love outlook so much not why others hate thunderbird with such passion.

From my perspective, with outlook I find it extremely hard to keep up with day to day messages and can rarely find emails I need once they've fallen out of my current inbox view. The calendar is really confusing and I often misread times or even the correct day in the way it draws everything.

On thunderbird I can usually find emails in a matter of seconds, even from years ago. The calendar is clear and I never misread the date or time.

Both suck a bit in terms of HTML or rich text message editing.

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

Re: BS on the cheap

I'm in a few musical performance Facebook groups and there's been a few mentions and gnashings of teeth about some of these movie themed musical concerts.

Best I can come up with right now is this page from Howard Shore warning about knock-off concerts: https://howardshore.com/notice-unofficial-concerts/

I think the musicians were complaining about not getting paid after performing in the bootleg ones (which they didn't necessarily know weren't official until afterwards).

IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security

Re: The problem is law is old and tech is new

"straightforward translation to bricks-and-mortar ethics"

If somebody burgles your house that's a crime regardless of whether they picked the lock or you left the key in the door.

However I suspect in the case bricks and mortar the police wouldn't give you much sympathy if the criminal gained entry through your negligence. Your insurance might also not pay out.

Whereas tech companies who metaphorically leave the key in their door usually get to publicly blame it all on the 'evil' hacker who attacked their reassuringly experience software. Their insurance(s) might even pay out in spite of their gross negligence.

It's hardly a fair comparison

Re: The problem is law is old and tech is new

"the company should be prosecuted for terrible security practice too"

Please name the law which prohibits terrible security practice.

Obviously there's things like GDPR which can result in a company getting fined after a significant data breach but if that goes anywhere at all it's unlikely to result in much more than a financial penalty. What are the chances of anybody responsible for creating or selling software with terrible security actually being charged with a crime?

I think this is half the trouble. There's no law (that I know of) against terrible software and companies continue to pump out stuff with little or no consideration for security.

Yet an individual who finds one of these flaws is at serve risk of getting a criminal record even if they did nothing more than discover the problem and, rightly, report it to the vendor.

Meanwhile organised criminals are remotely hacking these things, exploiting vulnerabilities, stealing data and blackmailing people from various shady corners of the planet and are often very unlikely to be caught.

I definitely think there needs to be much more legal responsibility put on the vendors to ensure their code is secure and kept up to date - ironically to achieve that they'd probably need to hire hackers/pen-testers to prove it

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

One of Mark Moxon's recent contributions to the game was to port the music (Blue Danube) from C64 Version to BBC Micro: https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=384503#p384503

Philips recalls 340 MRI machines because they may explode in an emergency

Re: If you aren't full of shrapnel you will probably suffocate

That iconic moment when Sylvester McCoy told Ace they were safe and then the Daleks elevated! :-)

Ubiquiti blunder let some folks view others' security cameras, accounts

What a mess! A product like this needs to be secure by design such that this kind of blunder simply isn't possible.

This is exactly the reason that there's no chance I'll be getting any "cloud" connected cameras or microphones any time soon..

The kids keep asking if we can get an "Alexa" - nope!

It's a real shame this serious breach of trust comes from UniFi because, like several other posters, I have been very impressed with their products and although I'm not considering any cameras (even on-prem ones), I'll be a bit more wary of their security next time I'm looking at their products.

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

Re: I wouldn't care if it worked

Middle click paste from a primary buffer is a core function for me and a total deal-breaker if not available.

Re: Waylan support is coming to the Mate desktop

I'd be up the proverbial creek without a paddle if it weren't for MATE but it drives me mad that RedHat's sabotage of Linux desktops has now leaked into lots of parts of MATE, e.g. the disk manager and "Simple Scan" which are GNOME applications and use client -side decorations and the horrendous buttons and hamburger menus that get embedded into the fat not-quite-a-title-bar

RedHat has wildly trashed a lifetime's worth of UI concepts and forced it onto just about everybody, removing all the flexible and user choice which we once had. So I'm at the point if thinking that even if Wayland offered me anything that X doesn't, it's got RedHat stamped all over it so I'm out.

MATE on the other hand is run by an awesome bunch of amazing people who continue to deliver worthwhile features and improvements. I really hope that a similarly amazing group of people and companies come together soon to stick two fingers up at RedHat and work either to keep X11 alive or implement something like the X12 idea with sufficient backward compatibility.

Meanwhile I'm going to figure out how to obtain the latest release under Ubuntu 20.04 to get new feature to disable mouse scrolling in the window selector and check out whether Pluma has any kind of automatic recovery yet.

Ubuntu Budgie switches its approach to Wayland

Re: "Says who?"

What you call consensus, others may call coercion...

There's a lot more stick than there is carrot in this case. RedHat especially, is being ruthless with it's crusade to push out the one true desktop (theirs: GNOME) on the one true UI library (theirs: GTK) running on the one true graphical platform (somewhat theirs: Wayland)...

By threatening to axe their development of X11 and spreading FUD about how it's essentially dead etc, they're absolutely coercing the smaller players into compliance.

"That's a nice little desktop you're maintaining there.... Would be a shame if something bad happened to it, no?"

Spot on, sir!

Re: "SSD, for example"

I believe this is correct however the damage is already done. So many libraries, desktop environments and applications have been pushed into switching to CSD under the false claim that Wayland does not and will not support SSD that now it's almost irreversible even thought there is now apparently some SSD support in Wayland

Best you can hope for is a classic title bar and buttons wrapped around an application with a CSD title bar plus embedded buttons and hamburger menus etc.

In their oh-so-infinite wisdom, the GNOME/GTK folks have decided to taint their CSD title bar with critical buttons/menus which cannot be displayed any other way, so the obvious choice of signalling to the application that you've got SSD so it can kindly hide it's CSDs isn't going to work.

It's a mess!