Posts by Oh Homer 1161 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2013
Not being fanatically pro-Linux or anti-Windows, but honestly, for me the OS is mostly irrelevant.
Just install whatever works, and a browser.
Done.
Optionally for gamers, install Steam (and Proton if needed).
This nonsense of Microsoft trying to force the entire planet to upgrade their hardware, just to support Microsoft's pointless whims, is just funny.
And in the middle of a global economic crisis, it's absolutely hysterical.
Goodbye Microsoft.
If America wants to be isolationist, let them be isolated. They don't want us, we don't want them.
That includes IMF meetings or any other conferences. Let American delegates sit alone in otherwise empty conference halls. That will give them plenty of opportunity to discuss how badly they fucked up.
At this point, they are no better than the Norks. In fact they're worse, in terms of the threat level.
Seems like a non-problem.
I mean the entire usr hierarchy is basically pointless to anyone not still living in the 1970s, but it's all symlinked now anyway, and I've never really had a problem with the rest of it. It has certainly never confused me in any way.
OTOH, if Apple-ising Linux is somebody's passion, more power to them. Keep it very far away from me, but good luck to you.
The end result may be of interest to some extremely niche demographic, but I can just imagine the utter nightmare it might present whenever attempting to actually compile anything, especially given the myriad of build and make systems and languages.
OK so I'm assuming they've worked most of that out already, especially given that they need to build the distro itself in the first place, but it'd make me quite nervous. Ironically their "simplification" might actually make things more complicated.
It's nice to scratch your own itch, but this really ain't my itch, nor I suspect many other people's.
My 20 year use of Firefox ended 3 days ago.
I've switched to LibreWolf for now (which is essentially just Firefox with all the sinister crap removed). Eventually I will switch to Ladybird. This seems to be the popular consensus among browser geeks.
I'm not in the least surprised by this. Mozilla have been getting exponentially more egregious for years.
For me, the 3 biggest issues are:
1. The idea that a piece of supposedly free software, that I use entirely independently of the developer, presumes to compel me to use it only in accordance with their "terms", is absolutely outrageous. It's none of their damned business how I choose to use their browser. We're not talking about copyrights here, this is literally just my use of the software as a web browser. How dare they presume to tell me what I can do with it. Cheeky bastards. This would be like Ford telling me I can drive anywhere but Manchester. What the actual fcuk?
2. They used to clearly state that they would never sell my data, but now they've removed that statement. Their excuse is that California has a weird definition of "sell". Excuse me, but what the fcuk does California have to do with me? If you actually cared about privacy rights, you'd tell California to go fcuk themselves, and just add a clause to the effect of "Due to California's moronic laws, sadly we can no longer license the use of Firefox in that State". Are you really going to screw the entire global population of Firefox users because of a single State in America? Sorry, I'm not buying it. I think you're just using that as an excuse for your foray into AI data harvesting.
3. The "other people do it" excuse doesn't wash. Mozilla was created in the first place specifically to be the one who "doesn't do it". So regardless of the details, the fact is you've betrayed your own founding principles, and consequently betrayed your userbase, none of whom now have any reason to continue using your products, as they are now functionally indistinguishable from those of any other for-profit corporation.
Yes I think the demise of Mozilla was inevitable, given how utterly tone deaf they've been over the years, and especially how they seemed to completely lack any moral compass (Mozilla really doesn't seem to understand the concept of "consent"). However, now we're actually at the end, it's still incredibly sad.
Goodbye Mozilla.
I hate all of 'em, but I reserve my Special Hatred® for the ones that just give up and go back to the beginning of their script, if you keep selecting the "No that doesn't even remotely answer my question" option, around and around in a loop, forever.
One company that we deal with in particular, seemingly has no contact options of any kind, other than a moronic chatbot, which of course has so few response options that it's clearly just a token gesture, never intended to be actually used, just so they can tick the "Extensive customer support" checkbox in the marketing literature.
So I suppose it's only fitting, then, that everyone here uses a marketing contact at the aforementioned company, who exposed his email address to us unintentionally, as their first as only point of contact with them.
And every time we email him for any reason unrelated to marketing (which is basically every email), he politely agrees to help us, but reminds us that he is not the correct contact for e.g. tech support. And every time, we thank him, but politely point out that his company doesn't actually have any support contacts.
We do this partly in the vain hope that he might actually retort with an actual contract address. But of course, he never does.
First of all, TPM is absolutely the most pointless tech ever devised, especially as there have already been multiple successful hacks.
As far as I can tell, the sole purpose of TPM is an attempt to lock people into Microsoft's ecosystem ("He who controls the bootloader...").
Having said that, allegedly there is a way to use Linux on hardware infected with TPM (enabled).
I read the docs for this, several times over, until my brain melted. Did I mention I'm a Gentoo user (and Void Linux) for past 20 years, so not exactly a noob, but this is honestly the most perversely convoluted, overengineered and complicated shit of all time.
Frankly it would just be a whole lot easier to disable TPM, and never install Windows. Ever.
Bonus points if I can rip that shit out of its socket and smash it with a sledgehammer.
What exactly is left to experience from Microsoft?
A new and innovative form of subscription based spyware, powered by AI?
I'm petty sure everyone knows exactly what Microsoft is, by this point. It's not like they've actually innovated anything useful recently, or, for example, ever.
Same goes for the entire tech industry, frankly.
One of our many local potholes is called Harry. He celebrated his 23rd birthday last Wednesday. There was cake and everything.
That makes him older than the average mental age of our councillors.
Why would the local council be somehow unaware of the existence of a two decade old pothole, that they would feel it necessary to waste taxpayers' money on some "AI" robot to hunt them down?
Just literally get in your car and drive, anywhere. They're impossible to avoid.
Instead of wasting money on stupid robots, how about using it to actually, you know, fix the damned roads?
I can 1000% guarantee that Google will never reintroduce Manifest v2, or facilitate anything that undermines their core business.
Which for those who may have forgotten, is the global monopolisation of spam, and the pursuit of every technical and legal measure necessary to force everyone to see it.
There's undoubtedly a quid pro quo for the Linux Foundation. They get to sell themselves like a bunch of dirty pros, while Google stuffs their pockets with quids.
ARM is technically correct, licenses are not transferable.
Although Qualcomm's argument seems to be that it was already licensed for exactly the same IP as Nuvia, which seems unlikely, but I guess we'll soon find out.
The only significant takeaway I get from this is that IP is, as ever, a cancer, and that we'd all be much better off if it had never been born.
I supposedly fall into the geriatric demographic still loyal to TV, however the reality is that I gave up watching TV two and a half decades ago in the late nineties, around the time of the rise in popularity of "reality TV".
The sort of garbage on TV at the time included such masterpieces as "Ibiza Uncovered", "Cops", and my personal favourite, "Britain's Most Violent Pubs".
I remember thinking at the time that, if I really want to immerse myself in anti-social behaviour for entertainment purposes, all I need to do is step outside, and frankly I got more than enough of that in real life. I watched TV to escape that shit, not subject myself to a rerun of it.
There were also very early warning signs of the emergence of "Woke" culture in TV, or what used to be called "political correctness". Everything felt a little too preachy for my liking.
From what I've heard, mainstream media has now fully succumbed to Woke cancer, and things have only gotten significantly worse, so it seems I cut the cable at exactly the right moment.
These days I get orders of magnitude more entertainment value from certain youtubers and Twitch streamers than anything the mainstream media has to offer. And as far as the news is concerned, I was never that interested in the blatantly manufactured propaganda peddled by mainstream news outlets in the past, I'm even less interested in it today.
Re: the subheading, I've always hated webmail, but I realise that nobody from Millennials onwards has even heard of the concept of an email client. This is the biggest hurdle that Thunderbird faces.
Over the years I've made my computing environment and workflow simpler and simpler, so for me even Thunderbird is too bloated, and I now use neomutt.
I realise I'm literally a dying breed, but that's fine by me. As long as I get to keep doing things the way I want to, for the few years I have left, what the technophobic consumer generation chooses to do thereafter is none of my concern.
Just stop using the "cloud". And "subscription" software.
No really, just stop.
The argument that this anti-consumer garbage is supposedly "needed" by professionals, that there is no suitable alternative, and that they couldn't possibly do their job without it, is complete and utter horseshit. Most of the best art ever made, for example, was created long before computers even existed. "Need" my ass.
I can only conclude that your average sheeple is an incurable masochist who just really enjoys rewarding bad behaviour.
I've seen street artists produce the most astonishing work, from nothing but a piece of chalk, or upturned plastic buckets and bits of leftover plumbing.
People who are genuinely creative don't need props, they don't need any tool in particular, they can use literally anything to express their art.
The sort of people who claim to be completely debilitated unless they have access to some fashionable toy gadget, are utterly delusional. They're not artists, they're just mindless consumers.
The only way to stop these Silicone Valley gangsters is to stop giving them your money. Stop rewarding bad behaviour.
When "Napster" officially ended it wasn't what a lot of (younger) people thought it was. The real Napster died years earlier.
Same goes for ICQ.
I remember the original fondly, but only because it was one of many iconic landmarks of my youth, not because I really used it much. Surprisingly, I do still remember my ICQ number, which is weird considering I barely ever used it.
The thing that's about to pass into the abyss is not the thing that was born three decades ago. It's just a name, like Napster.
Yes, remember them?
People seem to have very short memories.
I dumped Facebook the moment I realised it was being used by Farage and various other highly dubious interests, from places as far afield as the US and Saudi, as a tool to sabotage the EU and line their own pockets.
The fact that they subsequently won, and got away with it scot free, did not exactly improve my opinion of them.
There was a tsunami of outrage, then ... silence. Followed by amnesia, apparently.
Why the hell is anybody still using Facebook?
Seriously.
I realise that having an actual conversation using complete sentences is a bit passé, although some people on Reddit have been accused of trying.
Sadly, by the time I finally discovered Reddit, it had already degenerated into a shithole filled with incomprehensible degens and tin-pot dictator mods, the latter of whom take a perverse pleasure in enforcing entirely unwritten rules, or in other words just making up shit as they go. Which is, frankly, pretty much every social network platform these days.
Just look at YouTube, for example. The latest case I heard about is a thirty-something YouTuber who is being constantly demonetised because, according to the divine algorithm, she's a child, and children hosting YouTube channels is verboten ... or something.
A lot of Usenet is also moderated, of course, but from what I remember with significantly more sanity. However, personally I'd rather be the judge of what I do or don't get to read, and unlike every web-based social network out there, Usenet clients actually provide the tools necessary to do that ... properly.
If you actually read the OSI definition here (https://opensource.org/osd/), and don't worry because it's refreshingly concise, it's remarkably similar to the FSF definition.
Although I completely agree that "open" is too vague, and is therefore vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.
I also completely understand that Raymond was trying to distance himself and the community from what he perceived as a sort of quasi-religious extremism, but the word he settled on was a very poor choice IMO.
"Open" is merely a state that exposes the contents, and therefore makes those contents visible. There's nothing in that which confers any rights, and that's a crucial omission. If I leave my front door open, you can see inside my house, but that does not somehow give you the right to enter my property.
Freedom, OTOH, explicitly confers rights. As the Llama 2 community has discovered, this discrepancy makes a big difference.
The other problem is that neither OSI nor FSF have any legal power to police the misuse of the words "open" or "free", so you can expect the professional liars at megacorps to peddle whatever bullshit they want with complete impunity.
The best we can do is complain about this blatant propaganda, and hope that somebody with the power to do something about it actually cares.
Honestly, Google and Mozilla are as bad as each other, just for different reasons.
With Mozilla, you have to contend with their ridiculous "release early, release often, break always" mentality, where they obsessively remove features that everyone likes, while adding features nobody wants.
With Google, it's an endless battle for control of the web - Google at one end trying to stuff you like a foie gras goose with spam, and you at the other frantically trying to stop them.
At least Firefox still supports Manifest V2, unlike Google, and therefore you might actually be able to stem the torrent of spam currently headed towards Chrome users.
Nice try, but then I'd be scolded for violating our "paperless office" environmental policy.
My job is basically, dig a hole, don't put your dirt in Boss #1's yard, then Boss #2 asks why I put dirt in his yard, and tells me to refill the hole, thus enraging Boss #1. But instead of a shovel and dirt, it's a PC and PDFs.
Apparently I'm the only person in our company with Acrobat Pro (personal copy), so up to now it's been left up to me to modify any PDFs where the original Doc is mysteriously missing.
It's mostly contacts, that require somebody's name and signature inserted, and sometimes the dates or specific terms need changed.
Mere "annotation" doesn't cut it, as often stuff actually has to be removed.
It's a pain in the ass, tbh, but the corporate mindset has a pathological aversion to editable documents, yet otoh they keep passing me uneditable documents to edit.
I once took it on my own initiative to recreate a PDF from scratch in Word. That didn't go down well. I got a 10 minute lecture about policy compliance. They literally just want uneditable documents, and they want me to edit them.
No but I've found that I'm constantly being led towards content/creators I don't like.
I think the issue is that the algorithm is conflating academic interest with support. What I research and what I agree with are not even remotely connected.
Now you might argue that if the algorithm detects a pattern in my research, it's right to conclude that I will naturally want more of the same, but the problem is that it doesn't seem to be able to tell the difference between content that's dryly analysing a subject, and content that's fanatically endorsing it.
And yes it probably is true that left wingers are more likely to play on both sides of the fence, specifically because of our more academic tendencies. Whereas right wingers tend more towards wilful ignorance and dogmatism. So it isn't really surprising that the algorithm is skewed to the right.
Just "web browser capable hardware" would do it, frankly.
Our entire business is run on cloud services, accessed via a browser. Literally everything, from accounting to customer support. Nobody here has even heard of Active Directory (except me, the resident geek).
Every PC at this company runs whatever version of Windows it shipped with, plus Chrome.
Local storage requirements are basically zero. With the right login, we can access everything from any of those PCs. Add any new device at any location in our business, and it's fully operational without installing anything, other than Chrome and the right login.
Any system goes titsup, we don't even bother wasting time with a diagnosis, we just redeploy from a standard image, or pull another box out of the warehouse as a last resort.
We could literally run bare-bones kiosk systems with barely any operating system and a browser, and we'd not notice even the slightest difference.
For us, the OS is literally irrelevant. It's just a delivery vehicle for the browser, which in turn is just a vehicle for cloud services.
OK so what happens when the internet goes down?
Well the reality is that, without various forms of internet-based coms, and especially electronic payments, there wouldn't be much for us to do anyway, at least nothing that generates any actual revenue.
So worrying about the internet going down is like not buying a car because sometimes the roads are flooded by freak weather. Only worse, because typically public roads don't come with guaranteed Service Level Agreements and compensation packages.
Of course, this whole line of reasoning falls apart if you have permanently crap internet, like I do at home. I can barely stream a 480p YouTube video, much less an entire operating system plus AAA games. So for home users like me, and there are plenty of us out there, DaaS is nothing but a distant dream.
"I have plenty of Abandonware on my PCs that can no longer be found"
The difference is that you can still run that abandonware on your fully updated PC, potentially decades after it was abandoned, even if that requires using the likes of dosbox or similar.
And you don't have to contend with Microsoft arbitrarily hitting a killswitch that deliberately disables software just because it's "too old".
Sure, there are compatibility issues, but that's not quite the same thing as being deliberately blocked. And unlike Android, you can easily work around those compatibility issues.
So where is the Android compatibility layer that will keep all my abandonware running in perpetuity, like on Windows?
This is especially ironic given that Android is a Java-like virtual machine, where you're supposed to be able to "write once, run anywhere" forever.
Well, I guess not.
Unfortunately a solid 50% of everything on my Android phone is probably abandonware at this point, despite my best efforts to find acceptable replacements over the years.
That includes the launcher itself (in my case the original, now abandoned version of Apex, before the new owners destroyed it).
I guess this is the inevitable consequence of making software development too accessible, by dumbing it down to the level that opportunistic kiddies dump their one-hit-wonders into the app store, before losing interest and running away.
So what will smartphone users do once the only apps they actually want to use have been essentially blocked by Google?
Go back to using PCs, I guess.
I'm not so naive as to think we can continue raping and pillaging planet Earth without dire consequences, I'm just a bit fed up being at the top of the pile of sacrificial lambs, while the wolves are allowed to continue roaming free.
Seriously, just let me have my goddamn gaming PC already, and go pester the actual contributors to California's groundwater problem.
Will my owning a Potato PC somehow magically stop California's mindless, greedy, hedonistic agricultural industry from relentlessly sucking the groundwater dry?
My best guess would be no, that this problem will only be "solved" once the parasitic humans responsible finally succeed in destroying the source of their own existence, and finally yeet themselves.
Good riddance, but please leave me and my previous gaming PC out of it.
Greetings from what has apparently been designated as the last muddy outpost in Blighty scheduled to receive fibre broadband, probably several decades after every other household in the country.
I look forward to the prospect of subsidising everyone else's gloriously high speed internet, while I remain involuntarily stuck on "broadband" speeds roughly comparable to using 2 tin cans connected by a piece of string.
As the proud owner of an "Exchange Only" line, in the middle of a vast wilderness populated only by myself, a geriatric postmaster, and several sheep, I suppose I should be accustomed to paying through the nose for services I'm denied the privilege of enjoying, such as any form of public transportation, public road maintenance, or even a council dustbin, so this latest move fits perfectly.
I shall now begin a Patreon campaign to fund moving home to an inner-city slum, so I can reap the rewards of a 21st century lifestyle.
Whoda thunk that the Extinction Level Event that ends humanity will not be a deep impact of stupidly large space boulders, an invasion of morbidly curious aliens armed with suspiciously familiar looking plumbing and kitchen utensils, or the comparatively banal option of nuclear war, but it will in fact be a deficit of coffee running through our increasingly pulsating veins?
The movie "I am Legend" suddenly makes a lot more sense.
"The heck with freedoms, look how beautifully engineered our system is."
Pretty much, yes.
I'm far more interested in the craftsmanship of a tool than what people may choose to use it for. Whereas I can exercise control over the design of the tool, I can have no reasonable expectation of control over the people who use it, much less how they choose to use it. Nor should I aspire to such control in principle.
Personally, I find the general question of "freedumb" to be more than just misguided, it's actually sinister. The people whining loudest about it tend to have the most sinister motives.
I used to be a GPL purist, which is funny because I actually started out as a UNIX (Ultrix) guy, more interested in UNIX engineering principles than political idealism.
Over the years, I found it harder and harder to consolidate these two increasingly opposing principles. Not that there's anything intrinsically about the GPL that compels such licensed software to violate UNIX principles, that's just the pit that Linux fell into, or more accurately was pushed into, mainly by Red Hat and the Poettering cabal.
Systemd pretty much single-handedly cured me of whatever little GPL idealism I had. When it comes down to a choice between "enforced freedom" or proper engineering principles, I know what's more important.
The Yanks desperately trying to shore up their failing economy using a hopeless strategy, under the guise of "national security".
If it really wants to be competitive, maybe it could try, erm, you know, actually making stuff, without gouging customers.
But nope, clearly it's easier to run a protection racket than reopen factories.
Make America Broke Again!
Nope, seems spot on to me.
The UK 5g infrastructure has been fscked because of completely unsubstantiated hysteria peddled by a pathological liar.
The question is, will Boris now have the balls to admit he never really wanted to do this in the first place, now that he no longer has to appease the Orange loser?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
