Posts by BinkyTheMagicPaperclip

Agents made my retro tech safe to use again and showed their real value as testers of ideas

oh do go away

A lot of the point of using retro tech is learning from it, no, I absolutely do not want an agent to do everything for me - unless at most it can list the commands and explain exactly what it's doing before *I* do it.

Repeated iterations of 'good enough' are the problem of much of modern software development and sysadmin. This is especially true now the pace of hardware development has slowed, and hardware has increased radically in price, precisely due to all the 'AI' rubbish.

I will bet actual money that after creating a 'good enough' solution to prove the principle, virtually no-one will go back, understand the solution properly, and optimise it.

*Use your fucking brain, understand the basic principles, and do it yourself*

Keeping yesterday's computers ticking takes more than nostalgia

Re: Documentation

It's certainly the case that for various Sun systems the network address is stored in a module with an embedded battery which expires. It's possible to either get a new module and re program it, or take the existing module and scrape/burn the package until the contacts are visible, then solder a CR2032 holder on to it.

I've done this with a Sparcstation 20 and revived its connectivity.

I'd recommend RC2014/Small Computer Central kits

After a break of many years I've got back into soldering, courtesy of Small Computer Central and RC2014. Whilst this is still computer based, there's something compelling with working on hardware rather than Yet Another Software Problem. I'm enjoying this to the point that the next stage is a (fairly simple) circuit from scratch.

SCC kit tends to be 80 pin, RC2014 is mostly 40.

This is almost all through hole, and tolerant to a moderate extent of inept dabblers. I've just built one of the SCC CP/M kits, a Z180 with 512KB, and a switchable ROM monitor or BIOS running CP/M or BASIC. On to that I've added a compact flash card, a VGA/keyboard interface, and am adding a backplane extender[1] and some digital and analogue I/O.

That provides a solid state, low power system capable of booting into various CP/M type systems and other associated Z80 based OSes.

If you go RC2014 the world is your oyster. It's basically cards on top of a backplane. There's a number of Z80 options, but also 6502 etc. Then you can add video of your choice - simply a serial output, a VGA text out, or i.e. a TMS9918A board switchable to the port locations of various old 8 bit micro locations. So, it's possible to e.g. construct an MSX from a series of plug in ports.

It's probably not the best option if you're explicitly looking to build a specific 8 bit micro (there are other replica systems which handle that better, and the stability of the 80 pin and in particular the 40 pin connectors are sometimes worse than old edge connectors of yore, although probably not the ZX81..)

[1] I would recommend one of these from the start if you're using a kit with only a couple of sockets, two is not really enough. Also, if you use the SC715/SC729 it may need a 5V connector, and it'll be easier to use a backplane with a 5V connector than find one on the main board. Ask me how I know..

SpaceX revenue rockets while AI spending burns billions

All that wasted money, and nothing to show for it

I've stopped following Twitter, and the (mostly) knuckle draggers I see using Grok to answer something they could easily discover with a functioning brain don't impress, when I occasionally pop back on (and regret it)

Off Twitter the LLM arguments rage but no-one, *absolutely no-one* is talking about Musk's 'AI' offerings when debating the benefits or otherwise of LLMs.

The only things I hear about Grok are moronic questions (see above), and repeated notes of it still creating abusive images.

Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo

Re: Whoops

Thank you! Once I've actually got something to commit I'll have a look.

Whoops

I'm planning on doing some FreeBSD port contributions so will have to handle the 'joys' of git. Hopefully I can get a committer to handle my first commits and wrangle git..

I would point out though, that NetBSD is moving to Mercurial, and whilst OpenBSD does have a Github and Gothub mirror, it's still primarily using CVS. Then again, much though I love OpenBSD, some of it's technology is rather old. I've recently been fiddling with makefiles, and whilst GNU make is probably easier to use than the f/b make in NetBSD/FreeBSD[1] (functional, but not always user friendly), OpenBSD's make is positively stone age.

Work are TFS and Perforce. I used Subversion for one specific project, but no-one else ever took it up. Admittedly the GUI interfaces to it at the time were a bit limited.

[1] FreeBSD appears to periodically synchronise make code from NetBSD

Burnham wants Big Ecommerce to bankroll Britain's pubs

Re: Pretty much all costs are simply too high in the UK

This is entirely true, and the growth of large supermarkets and shopping malls should be a stark reminder of this.

However, there *is* value to being able to go somewhere, buy it immediately, and that will never be as low as online shopping, unless ecommerce providers are taxed to an extent they're on or near parity to retail shops. The costs of rent and rates is too high and needs to be covered.

Re: 2 separate problems

Whilst drink driving has - fortunately - become less of a socially accepted thing I really don't think it's a huge impact on the popularity of pubs.

Cheap alcohol in supermarkets has definitely been a factor, as you can buy a basic beer for well under 2 quid, whereas if you're lucky, in anything other than a Spoons beer will be 3-4 quid a pint absolute minimum and 5 pounds plus in city centres. Although if you're looking at nicer beer, the difference between the supermarket and a pub narrows more quickly.

A certain amount of the problem is also due to pubcos and their excessive pricing for their own beers, where landlords are treated as a resource to be extracted from and discarded.

Society does lose something when there aren't suitable melting points for the community and friends to gather together. It doesn't have to be a pub, but often that's one of the few suitable places, especially after 5pm. It's also worth considering that demand on pubs is very lumpy; some are definitely not making any money late at night or in the early afternoon. Being incredibly hard nosed about businesses would deprive society of some of the better outlets, and reduce everything to corporate mundanity.

Google breaks Alibaba’s record for Europe’s largest DMA fine

'Weakens its services'

Well, yes, *that's the entire point*. You're not supposed to get preferential treatment.

Shades of the 90s and Microsoft's shenanigans.

Too much to hope for a breakup, isn't it?

Microsoft emails Windows 10 holdouts: Fine, keep your old PC another year

There's an easy way around that

Add support for older, perfectly capable systems back to Windows 11, rather than praying people will have upgraded in a year.

Given that Microsoft are one of the people driving up the cost of systems with their support of 'AI', you reap what you sow.

Still, gives me another year to move to FreeBSD.

LisaFPGA brings Apple's magnificent misfire back in programmable logic

Neat, although there are alternatives

There are other (non FPGA) boards that will also recreate a Lisa. However it's a moderate amount of effort to do so, this one will no doubt be more convenient in the long run, and also this supports HDMI and USB peripherals.

MX Linux 25.2 provides possible refuge from AI as well as systemd

Cheers Liam

I've mostly been throwing Mint on Linux systems lately. If I wanted something systemd free I'd normally go for Salix (tried Devuan but it really is limited in terms of online support resources), but I feel that MX Linux might be worth a go.

NS&I dangles £220K salary for CEO willing to straighten out £3B IT mess

Re: First up...

It works here? Although I've not logged into my account for a while

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Re: Fantastic!

I probably shouldn't repeatedly comment, but I've been doing further fiddling with sh and it is an utter pain.

sh scripts by themselves are sort of tolerable

sh scripts run as a list using the -c command are a bit painful as one set of escapes are needed to pass various characters

sh scripts passed as a list through make are even worse because there's a set of escapes used to pass characters through sh -c, and another set through make

Yes, there are reasons for this. Yes, the automatic expansion of environment variables by the shell can be useful, but they also confuse things.

Doing this mostly as an exercise, and thoroughly understanding why many people choose to use awk instead.

Windows does this differently, is arguably not as flexible, but also tends to be easier to get your head around.

Re: Fantastic!

sh - which is itself an issue because pretty much every online resource refers to bash.

It really, really, isn't superior to PowerShell. In sh whitespace is very important, the syntax isn't well documented, and the errors are opaque. I do find PowerShell irritating at times, but it's far easier to find resources, documentation, and examples.

With PowerShell, because it's .NET, in a few lines of code you can pull in an external DLL (SQLite has one), construct an in memory database, easily work with a text or XML file that includes Unicode, manipulate it in that database, and write it out.

Re: Fantastic!

For the sort of tasks carried out at work, it's more than adequate.

If it needs the sophistication of a bash script, I would *much* rather use PowerShell. It's very powerful; I just wish Microsoft didn't try to hide it as a scripting language, rather than a way to drive the .NET runtime.

I've also been fiddling with sh scripting recently (not under Windows) and it is an incredible fussy chore. That's not surprising given the age of sh, but PowerShell really is several orders of magnitude better.

Re: Can it output objects?

Yeah.. I'm aware of the issues of :

expecting cmd to be the same as Powershell, and then finding out that e.g 'cd progra*' does not work in PowerShell

running Unix utilities ported directly to Windows, and having to deal with back/forward slash confusion

running both Cygwin and Windows programs within Cygwin's shell, and then having to integrate with the different filesystem layout

These utilities may remove some of that confusion

Re: Fantastic!

Not particularly. Most of the utilities are pretty mature, and I don't see them changing much.

I mean, that's assuming the Rust versions are actually any good, and haven't introduced new bugs - which undoubtedly they have, in the corporate driven rush away from C.

Re: Can it output objects?

The article links to the project, which then links to the list of commands and what they can do, but the spoiler is : no, at least not based on the documentation.

If you're going to fiddle with structured objects, you're better off using PowerShell, which is explicitly designed to work in that way.

Fantastic!

If I can get work to have this installed in a build by default, or at least in the company software centre, this means I don't have to run the gauntlet of trying to explain 'first install Cygwin', or rewriting what can be done easily with existing Unix utilities using Powershell.

It'd be nice to have diff as well, but comm and uniq will do a lot of what I'd want. There's no worry about licenses or provenance if Microsoft are maintaining this too.

Microsoft reaches for olive branch after public dustup with 0-day researcher

Re: Time for a Code of Practice

To be entirely fair to Microsoft they have gone through phases. Around the mid 00s, especially when security really started to be a thing (before then, if you were lucky you could avoid being hacked due to a substandard configuration. Afterwards, you couldn't) they tried to take things seriously - Vista for all its initial faults, was one facet of this. Application developers were dragged kicking and screaming to the idea that No, you cannot have admin access all the time, and now the programs have to be coded a little better. Much less direct hardware access, user mode instead of kernel components, etc.

There were still a load of bugs of course, but the intent was there. The overall stability of Windows from Vista SP2 through 8 improved, even if 8's interface was awful. Then once 10 hit it started to worsen again. I'd say that, personally, after around a year of fixes I found 10 has been very stable but 11 does seem to be rather variable.

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: Who could have predicted this would be a bait and switch?

In the case of the gig economy, the workers get screwed, with not enough pay for too much work.

Online dating sites - oh, you'll *definitely* get screwed this month honest - but not by someone human. Maybe if you pay for Dating Pro Max 3 someone will notice you? Basically they deliberately keep you on the site, and de-emphasize searches unless you pay. For some sites unless you're an adonis, to see a better chance of being noticed you need to go beyond the 'let me message as many people as I want' tier to the 'your message will be prioritised' tier, plus the 'pay extra so the recipient can read your message even if they're not subscribed' tier because opposite sex dating, at least, is incredibly asymmetrical (not that many people help themselves, even when the dating site itself isn't trying to ruin things)

Who could have predicted this would be a bait and switch?

Who could have thought this would follow the same rules as the gig economy, or online dating sites?

Well, apart from anyone not blinded by 'AI' that is.

If you must do it get an AMD Strix an Nvidia DGX Spark (or spend a ludicrous amount on a server) and host it locally. If the local models can't do what you want, well, all these cloud services can just keep raising the price until the pips squeak, can't they?

The question is whether the firms offering LLMs have attached enough bait and lock in to pull off the switch. Frankly, I don't think they have. I wouldn't bet money they've gathered enough buy in to avoid heavy losses either.

X limits hot takes from freeloaders to 50 a day

oh dear, never mind, what's for tea?

I've not made 50 replies in the past six months for Twitter, and have posted precisely zero times.

The last post I made was to direct people to Mastodon.

Since I de-emphasized Twitter it's gone downhill ever more, and abounds with right wing nutjobs.

Google'll grab your gigs if you don’t cough up your number

Already moved, thanks

I have to admit Google Mail has excellent spam prevention, but I got tired of the changing functionality and them scanning your mail, and moved to Mythic Beasts.

I'm now paying money, the interface (RoundCube) is not as good, neither is the spam prevention. The mail filtering is decent, but it uses Exim which isn't exactly user friendly.

Still for the most part I don't even use the web interface, it's IMAP all the way with Thunderbird on desktop, and FairEmail on mobile.

Once set up it's Just Worked.

I'd rather not self host, it's a fair bit of extra hassle that takes time away from other more interesting things, when for a few quid a month someone else can handle it and my web hosting.

Re: Time to buy that burner phone

If you mean 'a number' just for phone calls, it may be much cheaper to get a VoIP number. It will eat battery if you keep the number permanently on, and calls cost money, but if it's just for incoming it can be a decent option. Particularly if the calls go straight to voicemail..

Re: Time to buy that burner phone

They're wise to that - the credit expires in short order. I was on 1pmobile for backup PAYG data - which is very expensive at 1p/MB, but sufficient if it's *only* used as a backup and as soon as you know it's going to be a prolonged outage, you buy a package.

Sadly they then change the PAYG expiry period rapidly enough it's easier just to buy a package every month - but not from them, because I'm not going to reward someone pulling a bait and switch.

Bedrock and a hard place: Claude adventure leaves AWS user staring down $30K invoice

If you're using it, you should be using it locally

If the local models can't do what the hosted ones can, then don't use an LLM full stop. Once usage of a cloud LLM is embedded into your company, they can charge what they want.

Anthropic’s Bun Rust rewrite merged at speed of AI

Re: It may just be me, but I'd've commited as a new project

That *would* be more sane, but wouldn't have as much recognition, or the opportunity to push an agenda.

Mystery Microsoft bug leaker keeps the zero-days coming

Re: An intentional backdoor for law enforcement?

There shouldn't be *any*. Windows used to have Easter eggs, but these were nixed due to security concerns.

The fact a complete bypass is included and made its way to production strongly suggests this is deliberate. I try not to be tin foil hat, but I think this is mandated by the TLAs.

If you care about security, you're going to have to go open source, and even then ensure the solution has been out for a while since it's not as if there haven't been issues there too.

Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release

Managed to get it working on FreeBSD

Died on the tutorial level with zero points..

Seems like a decent improvement, there's definitely more help within the game, and the curses interface has had enhancements when run at sizes larger than 80x25.

There's also a large amount of re-architecting to support cross compilation, so building for minority platforms should become easier. Plus an optional 'simplified' hints based build system, although currently I wouldn't call it entirely simple unless you already possess some knowledge of the source code and compilation (it appears easier to use the old build method, starting from a point of minimal knowledge), and it's not a huge surprise that by default the source seems aimed at old rather than new BSD systems.

We know what day it is but these Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke

Only the Pi Zero and lower end Pis are a compelling case

For everything else you should look long and hard at whether a similar embedded or second hand (if you're a consumer) PC are a better option.

The Pi Zero is probably overkill compared to other embedded devices, but it's so cheap that the tooling provides an advantage, and it doesn't affect the overall price. Lots of interesting projects created with that.

Pi 3, 4, or 5? Vaguely like a PC, but with a pain in the arse 'BIOS' (via configuration files), the utterly cursed micro HDMI ports, USB ports that aren't actually USB ports because their power output is shared between all ports and doesn't meet the USB spec if fully populated.

Then you've got the fact the graphics hardware is generally a closed source black box (I understand this may be changing.. slowly) that necessitated reboots when used heavily every few weeks when I tried it. Just get a low power PC and be done with it.

I tried using it as a desktop - bad, bad idea. Moved on to a Wyse 5070 (great if you limit memory to <30GB), then a Dimension 3000 fanless client, where their only real disadvantage is the embedded intel GPU is a bit anaemic, but then again it was never designed to be great.

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Buncefield

People forget, it was only twenty years ago! At least one company had production and DR separated by a mile or so, which would normally be acceptable, if only the large oil refinery right next door didn't decide to explode.

For some risk plans, the response to e.g. your main head office being hit by a plane on a day everyone significant is there may be 'go out of business'. However, a datacentre being wiped out should be able to be coped with.

Work have more than one datacentre, they're a moderate distance apart and separated by hills; in the risk profile it's very unlikely both will be taken out - but not impossible. If for instance they were both at opposite ends of Birmingham, and Birmingham (and only Birmingham) was somehow nuked, whilst there would be a lot of other things to worry about the sad truth is outside Birmingham life would go on.

You'd better hope you can restore from some offsite (different country) backup at the very least, because the alternative is hundreds of companies being affected, and hundreds of staff including yourself being out of work. The government, on the whole, aren't going to be nice about your work being dependent on a nuked city and have other things to worry about. Insurance is unlikely to cover it either.

AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar

Re: 1/3 wrong of 60 is progress (?)

You're presenting a very skewed hypothetical situation, but in general I would prefer a manageable quantity of higher quality data over an unmanageable quantity of lower quality data.

If LLMs have submitted 60 reports, there's human bandwidth to review these, and it's 40 genuine problems then that's a net positive.

If, on the other hand, there is no bandwidth to handle all those reports it may in general be better to have a smaller number of decent reports.

Your smoke alarm analogy only holds up if it's a choice between warning a third of the time when you make toast, or one that doesn't go off for small fires, to which the answer is : very definitely not the one that goes off a third of every week, or worse. There's plenty of evidence that alarms that go off too often are ignored, not to mention entire folk tales.

Still *if* LLMs can manage to find this many holes and *if* they are severe enough to be a problem then in this also hypothetical situation the only options are

stop using the product with flaws

employ more security oriented programmers and fix it. You're not going to have a choice if attackers successfully use an LLM as a force multiplier - cope with it, or die.

Never forget the power of AND. Too many meatsacks with too much power are causing chaos

AND

LLMs are being used inappropriately and wreaking environmental, social, and (at some point) financial destruction. It probably isn't 'existential' at this point, more just a large irritant.

Anthropic tweaks timed usage limits to discourage Claude demand during peak hours

Gosh, who *could have guessed this would happen*

So utterly unpredictable, except by everyone. Literally hundreds of years history to this, but most recently Uber is probably the most egregious example with 'surge pricing'.

If you must run an LLM, then host it locally, otherwise you're beholden to them pulling a VMWare on you.

Don't tie yourself to one provider, and don't pay for something if you don't really, really need it.

Linear moves sideways to agentic AI as CEO declares issue tracking dead

Waiting for the lawsuit and the consultancy clean up work

Have I got this right? You don't need many programmers any more - you just accept what the LLM has produced.

You don't need to track and trust what the LLM has written and tested doing in a tracker, just trust it understands the requirements and writes decent code

No doubt it deploys to production itself too and doesn't log what it did there either. Probably gets into arguments with other LLM agents and will then delete all the data in a fit of pique.

Waiting for the next set of security loopholes, and companies losing money because what they implemented isn't 'what the customer wanted' and caused fallout, but you can't prove that because there's no documentation.

All the tracking is boring, bureaucratic, and needs to be carefully balanced against need, but there are decent reasons for a lot of it. Being light on procedure only works when your industry isn't regulated and when all your customers are flexible and understanding. The moment they stop being reasonable, and it needs only one, in comes the box ticking and increased prices.

Claude attacks were 'Rorschach test' for infosec community, scaring former NSA boss

Re: ROI

Yep. *If* an LLM has value, then why is it not locally hosted?

Are people really daft enough to tie themselves into an industry that is losing money, and that as soon as it has a captive market will raise prices?

The reality from various open source developers also seems to be a huge amount of slop, where it's not actually a vulnerability and wastes a lot of human time.

Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor

Go for caffeine if you can handle it

There is another study which basically posits that frequent users of caffeine are no better for alertness than people than abstain for wakefulness, and that if they stopped drinking it'd be an improvement.

On minimal evidence but general life experience, I don't believe this!

As someone that can't handle caffeine, I would dearly like a bit of a pick me up occasionally. Seriously just go for the coffee if it works for you! I'll be snoozing in the corner with a ginger or chamomile tea..

Middle of the road works for a lot of things. Recently found that due to advancing age it's better to have moderate amounts of alcohol on fewer occasions, than smallish amounts of alcohol frequently.

I don't really miss caffeine that much, but damn, it smells *so good* when a container of coffee is opened. 30+ years since I've had a cup.

WSL graphics driver update brings better GPU support for Linux apps

integrated 32 and 64 bit WINE?

Definitely need to look into this to check the reality; it's been a real pain running it under FreeBSD as the 32 bit version breaks not infrequently but is absolutely necessary for some programs.

Then next up is getting the Vulkan translation layer working properly, currently it's rendering on the CPU which isn't good.

GhostBSD to ditch Xorg for XLibre as Red Hat's Wayland crusade leaves X11 fans out in the cold

Re: I've been using Wayland on FreeBSD for over a year, but some things are still an issue

Fair question, I have used xrandr in the past but I tend to default to using xorg.conf to configure anything from the start.

Yes, it works, thank you!

xrandr --output HDMI-1 --mode 1600x1200 --left-of DP-2

xrandr --output DP-2 --primary --mode 2560x1440

If I don't use xrandr or an xorg.conf it defaults to one mirrored screen and an 1152x864 resolution, which seems very odd indeed. Wayland here works 'fine' in that it correctly determines the maximum resolution, refresh rate, and that there are two monitors but it does sometimes get the positioning wrong and needs to be corrected.

Re: I'm reading a disaster

Go on then, I could do with a laugh whilst you're still on crack.

Off you go, find some 'proprietary programs without source code' in an OpenBSD install. Note that firmware for graphics cards, wireless adapters, or CPU microcode updates do not count - it's not running on the CPU itself.

Then if you're certain you're correct, e-mail a discussion list and tell Theo OpenBSD has proprietary software, whilst I go and fetch my popcorn.

I've been using Wayland on FreeBSD for over a year, but some things are still an issue

This week I decided to try getting Steam working on my fanless (Dell/Wyse Optiplex 3000 thin client) system, and after fiddling yes, I can get turn of the century games working OK on it[2]

One problem though : it's broken on Wayland, complete no go.

Killed Wayland, started Xorg [1], and it was other than [1] a complete pleasure. Able to use cwm again which has *sane defaults* over labwc that I've been using that.. doesn't. Yes, I'm pretty certain I can get labwc to do what I want but it is a pain, and I don't really want to put 're-implement cwm as a Wayland compositor' on my project list. Wayland is good enough, but it doesn't really make me happy.

I've been trying Wayland because it's likely to be The Future, and I'd rather give new things a go rather than become an old fart, but I have to say there is still room for improvement. There are too many programs that either don't work with Wayland, or claim to, but then you check and there's an XWayland session in the background and it requires determined effort and fiddly config to run a pure system.

[1] This admittedly was a huge pain. Maybe on Linux users multiple monitors are fine, but I wasted a couple of hours fiddling with xorg.conf which crucially needed multiple Option "Monitor-<connector>" sections under Device, Monitor sections with LeftOf and RightOf, a ModeLine and crucially an Option "PreferredMode" (which I missed several times). This is one thing I didn't need to mess around with under Wayland.

[2] I say 'OK' it required various fiddling, then you need to use wine/proton otherwise saving the game crashes it, and Wine-Proton 9.0 needed to be installed inside Steam itself.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

The cheapest decent option for VR is the Meta Quest, you'll be paying a significant premium for anything else.

As far as I'm aware the main Linux VR options are HTC (which is generally regarded as inferior to other options and expensive), and the Index (which is no longer sold). Plus from listening to people's experience of VR and Linux what I hear is that it 'works' but Windows is generally better, which I wouldn't describe as 'fine'.

If you have the Vision, that costs a grand. Whilst I'm not a particular fan of Meta, and bought a PSVR2 and PC adapter specifically to get a headset not tied to them, a Vision is almost *three times* the cost of a Meta Quest 3S.

I am looking forward to seeing the Frame as a Linux first headset, but we're not quite there yet.

There is zero need *for you*. I'm glad you can run things entirely on FOSS.

For most other people, things are improving, but sometimes your interests dictate Windows is the way to go. e.g. VR is vaguely possible on Linux, but most of the time you'll be using Windows and/or paying a *significant* hardware premium. This may change when the Valve Frame comes out in 1H26 - be nice to see that happen.

I already use FreeBSD for most of my non work productivity, and am moving my main desktop to it, but it will still require both Linux and Windows VMs to run all the software I still wish to run. There's a limit to how masochistic I wish to be.

There should be a degree of pragmatism here

Ultimately the open source company needs to make money, there's limited resources, so fight the battles you can win.

The open source companies should be helping each other. That means paying for software, trialing it internally until it's usable, and then moving on to using it with external customers. With a clear conscience they should be able to say 'Yes, we're using this proprietary product now because the open source options are not capable enough,but we're contributing/funding projects and will move when they're mature' and actually have progress reports each year.

Teams isn't fantastic, but Jitsi is utterly awful. Tried it a while back, it's so embarrassingly poor compared to Zoom or Teams, I'd be mortified if I had to suggest it to anyone.

However, that's not an excuse not to try. If an open source company isn't at least trying to use an open source office suite, e-mail, and other productivity it's a failure of a company. It's not serving its users, and it's not serving the wider open source/Unix community (Unix is not just Linux). This does, as doublelayer suggests above, have to be coupled with contributing or paying the creator of the software so it actually improves.

I'm going to agree with Throatwarbler too, though. Groupware is not an easy option. There's lots of components that are possible via open source, but bringing them together as a usable whole and in a sensibly self or third party hostable service is a different matter. At that point there's not a lot of difference competing with commercial alternatives, except you have the disadvantage that if the groupware is polished enough a third party can out compete you in business by just taking your technology and *boy* does a subset of open source companies and fans not like the implications of that.

Re: Too much ideology makes Liam unproductive

I presume all the downvotes are about opinions on Linux, but you're absolutely right that Skype and Windows Phone were solid products. For Windows Phone despite the OS being solid, Microsoft refused to hold their nerve and continue throwing money after it in the same way they managed for XBox. They needed to fund all the apps and develop the ecosystem.

Even now, after many updates, Teams is not as feature complete as Skype for Business. SfB integrated with Outlook, meaning there was *one place* to search all your messages. It obeyed Windows standards properly. Its video performance was good enough.

Then Teams arrived. Not properly coded as a Windows program, it took months if not years before it started to follow the desktop/window theming. You can still only search within Teams itself. If a document is opened inside Teams it hides the entire remainder of the Window. Moronic design for people that can only do one task at a time and to chase after Zoom.

Not sure if dropping Edge for Edge Chromium is a good idea - probably not. Whereas it's a huge money sink to develop your own rendering engine Edge Chromium already has *three* engines it needs to maintain : Chrome (OK that's Google), Edge, and Internet Explorer (which is still embedded and necessary in Enterprise Mode for some sites[1]). In the long run it'll save money - provided Google play nice, but should Microsoft really bet on that?

[1] Although thank goodness for the area I work in we finally, *finally* got rid of our IE websites a couple of years ago. For the company as a whole it's almost entirely gone, but still present for a minority of customers..

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

9 inches is perhaps a little small for a GUI, although it had the advantage that the early non XL/Lisa Macs were fairly luggable.

The Kaypro series had a 9" monitor, and it's perfectly usable for 80x24 column text. Even today my model 10 is sharp and clear.

It's also a little unfair to compare a 'proper business computer' to a home computer, as the early home computers tended to use RF or composite at best. Good enough for games, not so great for spreadsheets.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: Remote desktop

There are other options - there's all the HTC Vive stuff, but that doesn't have a great price performance. There's the PSVR2 with PC adapter (it works well, but make sure you're using a Bluetooth adapter on the supported list, I'd recommend an Asus one). There's also the upcoming Valve Frame.

At the Microsoft end, WMR has been discontinued, but there is a WMR driver for Steam so it *shouldn't* need any Microsoft account at all.

If by 'tied hard' you mean 'requires Windows', then it is possible to get some of it working on Linux but you will be make life harder for yourself.

Perhaps best to wait out the Valve Frame and see how good it is.

You might have a point if it was about learning, but it pretty much never is. It's almost always about making money by shoehorning technology into a situation where it's either not suited, or isn't the ideal situation. 'LLMs' where an algorithm would be easier. NFTs /blockchain where in pretty much every situation a database would be better. Not to mention trying to hand wave away the social and environmental impact.

The alternative is the joy of CV padding, where an over complex solution is implemented because it gets the recipient kudos, something to stick on their CV, and a possible pay rise, even though it's not a good long term solution, or particularly efficient. Then the implementers move on, and some other schmuck has to fix their 'solution' properly.

Once the hype cycle ends, and the technology is used for the areas it's designed for, things are generally OK. Although then you'll get idiots saying a technology is useless because it hasn't taken over the world, ignoring the reality it works just fine in its specific niche.